“Up Jumped Spring” a spring poem by Al Young

Al Young, CA Poet Laureate visits VC

Monday April 21

12-12:45pm Poetry & discussion of poetics for change

1:30-2:30pm Poetry & Prose plus writing tips

both the above events take place in the Garden Patio

between the new library (LRC) and the old library (SSC)

7pm Guthrie Hall with live music, art and living history performance by Suzanne Lawrence

Ventura College 4667 Telegraph Road Ventura

Host: Gwendolyn Alley

What’s most fantastical almost always goes

unrecorded and unsorted. Take spring.

Take today. Take dancing dreamlike; coffee

your night, creameries your dream factories.

Take walking as a dream, the dearest, sincerest

means of conveyance: a dance. Take leave

of the notion that this nation’s or any other’s earth

can still be the same earth our ancestors walked



From “Up Jumped Spring” by Al Young

California poet laureate, Al Young, was born in Mississippi and was reading by the age of three. He began publishing poems, stories, and articles in his early teens, and has lived most of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has been a poet, writer, teacher and lecturer throughout his literary career and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California , Berkeley in Spanish. He has taught poetry and fiction writing at a number of universities nationwide, including the Universities of California at Berkeley , Santa Cruz and Davis ; and Stanford University . Versatile and prolific, his works have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Review, Seattle Review, Rolling Stone, and the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. As a screenwriter, Young has worked with Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor.

Thanks to Phil Taggart and Maggie Westland for helping to get the word out about these readings!