Berkeley Poet Fred Dodsworth Featured At Third Thursday Poetry
On Thursday, November 16, at 7:30pm The Third Thursday Poetry & Jazz Reading Series at 215 Main in Point Arena will feature Berkeley poet Fred Dodsworth. The reading will begin with live improv jazz and an open mic with jazz improv; the reading will conclude with more live improv jazz.
An ink stained wretch, Fred Dodsworth spent most of the last 30 years in newsrooms picking fights with mayors, police chiefs, congress critters and editors. Eventually he lost most of those fights, but the notches on his belt include at least one police chief, one mayor, and numerous politicians. Now he writes poetry and fiction because there's more truth to be found in fiction than in any news story ever printed.
Fred Dodsworth has launched and or edited or published more than a dozen magazines and newspapers and three books on California Indians. Six years ago he decided to go to college, graduating magna cum laude from SFSU in 2013 with a bachelors in Creative Writing (concentration in Gender Studies). Now he’s finishing his Masters in Poetry and his MFA in Fiction simultaneously.
Formerly a high-school drop out, front-page daily columnist (SF Examiner), award winning art director, sandal maker, and truck driver (not in that order), in his professional career Fred was fortunate enough to work with renown designer Roger Black and to publish work by Alan Ginsberg, June Jordon, Kim Addonizio, Amy Wallace, Garrison Keillor, Corby Kummer, Ginu Kamani and many other accomplished and beginning writers.
Co-host of the 8th 9th & 10th Annual SF Beat Poetry Festival, board member of the 20th 21st & 22ndAnnual Watershed Ecological Poetry Festival, co-organizer of the Northern California Book Awards for the prior three years, collective member of the Beast Crawl Collective for the first five years (now retired), founding board member of Bay Area Generations—A Reading Series For The Ages (now retired); for the past six years Fred Dodsworth has worked with Sharon Coleman producing Milvia Street, the venerable Peralta Colleges literary magazine. He is also publications advisor to Joyce Jenkins of Poetry Flash.
Fred has been a featured reader at the 2014 Annual Berkeley Poetry Festival, East Bay Alternative Book and Zine Fest, Art of the Muse, Broken Concrete, Literary Speakeasy, Red Light Lit at the Battery, Red Light Lit at McClaren Plaza, Pandemonium Press at the Spice Monkey, Pandemonium Press at the Octopus, Moe’s Books (twice), Writing Without Walls, the MFA Reading Series, Velvet Revolution, Rolling Writers, Nomadic Press, Get Lit, riverbabble, the Aesthetic Union, XYZ at the Stork, the SF Beat Poetry Festival, Rolling Writers, Heart of the Muse, Black Health Matters, Naked Bulb, and many other reading series events.
His stories and poems have been published in Red Light Lit, Rag Mag, Troop, Oakland Review #3, riverbabble, Transfer, Milvia Street, Bay Area Generations, Writing Without Walls, Saturday Night Special, Something Worth Revising, US Represented, 11-9 the Fall of Democracy, RISE!, and others. He’s currently finishing a book of poems, a book of short stories, and his first novel.
