David Starkey served as Santa Barbara’s 2009-2011 Poet Laureate. He is Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Barbara City College and the Publisher and Co-editor of Gunpowder Press. Over the past thirty years, he has published eleven full-length collections of poetry with small presses and more than 500 poems in literary journals such as American Scholar, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner and Southern Review. As an educator, he has written and edited a number of books, most recently Hello, Writer and Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief (4^th edition), both published by Bedford/St. Martin’s in 2021. David is also a founding editor of the California Review of Books and the host of Santa Barbara’s Creative Community.

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