On the 7/9/25 edition of Dr. Andy’s Poetry and Technology Hour:

Jamil Jan Kochai joins the show to discuss his upcoming reading at CapLit and his recent release, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak. Kochai details how his writing about Afghanistan and Sacramento grow with distance and in parallel to each other. He also discusses the writing process more broadly, and how that encompasses being a receptive learner. The next guest on the show is Naomi J. Williams, who further details the genesis of CapLit and their upcoming events. Williams discusses how CapLit goes about choosing novels that could be interesting as performances. She also shares praise for Priya Balasubramanian, who is performing at CLARA with Jamil 7/18/24 at 7 P.M. The last guest on the hour is Eve Imagine, who imparts on a conversation surrounding her recent release of autofiction, Body In Script. Imagine shares a section from her, titled “Heart Murmur.” She then outlines upcoming events, including a live reading on Facebook next Friday with Miriam Dorsett, and Rock Art by the Bay this upcoming Saturday.

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking, 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His second book, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking, 2022), won the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize, the 2024 Clark Fiction Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Fiction. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The Sewanee Review, VQR, and A Public Space, and they have been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker. He was a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. Kochai was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but his family originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. He is a graduate of California State University, Sacramento, University of California, Davis, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Naomi J. Williams is the author of the novel Landfalls. Her short fiction and essays have appeared, most recently, in LitHub, Bourbon Penn, Electric Literature, the Brevity Blog, and the Sacramento Noir anthology. Honors include a Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories honorable mention, Best Horror of the Year recommendation, and artist residencies at Hedgebrook, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Willapa Bay, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She’s taught creative writing at UC Davis, Sacramento City College, Saint Mary’s College, and, since 2018, the low-residency MFA program at Ashland University in Ohio. A biracial Japanese-American, Naomi was born and partly raised in Japan and lives today in Sacramento, California.

Eve Imagine is a writer living in midtown Sacramento. She teaches English at Sacramento City College Working to get her first novel Body In Script in more readers’ hands.

The Poetry Night Reading Series takes place on first and third Thursdays of the month at 7 PM, is generously supported by the people and poets of the Sacramento Valley, by John Natsoulas, Robby Nykodym, and by members of the staff at the John Natsoulas Gallery. Your host will be Dr. Andy Jones, the poet laureate emeritus of the City of Davis.

Find out more about Dr. Andy's Poetry Night Reading Series in Davis, California by visiting http://www.poetryindavis.com. Invite your friends to sign up for the mailing list. To learn more about Dr. Andy’s tiny media fiefdom, subscribe to his weekly newsletter at https://andyjones.substack.com.

On the 7/2/25 edition of Dr. Andy’s Poetry and Technology Hour:

Richard Loranger describes the creative panic that they have felt over the past couple years, taking on projects in many media, including podcasting and product naming. Along with these outlets, Loranger discusses writing in multiple genres and leading multiple workshops. Loranger shares three poems from an unpublished chapbook centered around the writing process, “The Truth,” “Your Body,” and “Bowery Poetry Club.” The next guest on the show is Jeffrey Bryant, the forthcoming author from Cherry Pie Press, which emerged from publisher Natasha Dennerstein in wake of the United States 2024 presidential election. Bryant then shares two poems titled “August Abade” and “Kissing and Kissing.” The last guest of the hour is Terry Tierney, who reflects on the release process of their most recent release Why Trees Stay Outside. Tierney states how he believes that everything has a voice, and that he tries to platform the voice of the natural world through environmental activism in his poetics. He then reads the title poem of the collection, “Why Trees Stay Outside.”

Richard Loranger is a multi-genre writer and spoken word artist who has been working around the United States for over forty years. He has done over 500 featured readings and performances from the Davis (CA) Jazz & Beat Festival to the main stage at Lollapalooza to The Bowery Poetry Club in New York. He leads writing workshops and offers a variety of literary services. He has work in over 100 journals and anthologies, and is the author of six books and ten chapbooks of poetry and flash prose.

Jeffrey Bryant is a Pushcart-nominated queer poet. His work has appeared in numerous publications including the LA Times, LA Weekly, Synkroniciti Magazine, Quill and Echo and Tension Literary, as well as the anthologies Coiled Serpent, Altadena Literary Review, Shadowplay Literary Journal and Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts. His debut collection The Catacombs of Vanished Lovers is forthcoming from Cherry Pie Press.

Terry Tierney is the author of the poetry collections Why Trees Stay Outside and The Poet’s Garage and the novels Lucky Ride and The Bridge on Beer River. His poems and stories recently appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review, Remington Review, Reed Magazine, Ghost Parachute, Flash Fiction Magazine, Rust + Moth, Typishly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Lake, and other publications. He lives in the Bay Area with his family, including two fluffy cats and an enthusiastic Golden Retriever. Website: http://terrytierney.com.

The Poetry Night Reading Series takes place on first and third Thursdays of the month at 7 PM, is generously supported by the people and poets of the Sacramento Valley, by John Natsoulas, Robby Nykodym, and by members of the staff at the John Natsoulas Gallery. Your host will be Dr. Andy Jones, the poet laureate emeritus of the City of Davis. Our July 3 Poetry Night will be a Wide-Open Mic night.

Find out more about Dr. Andy's Poetry Night Reading Series in Davis, California by visiting http://www.poetryindavis.com. Invite your friends to sign up for the mailing list. To learn more about Dr. Andy’s tiny media fiefdom, subscribe to his weekly newsletter at https://andyjones.substack.com.

On the 6/11/25 edition of Dr. Andy’s Poetry and Technology Hour:

The first guest on the hour is Nicolette Daskalakis, who joins the show to detail her career in the arts, which started as a high schooler at KDVS. Daskalakis reveals she was at one point the youngest ever staff member at the station, serving as the news director, before she went off to earn an undergraduate degree at USC and then to earn an MFA in France, impressively completed in the French language. Daskalakis details her inspirations for her most recent published poetry collection, Tell Me I'm Not On Fire (2024), before sharing a poem “Welcoming the Arsonist.” Dyson Kona Smith is the next guest of the hour, and he reflects on his undergraduate journey at UC Davis. Coming from Chicago, Illinois, Smith talks about his transition into academia and obtaining a multidisciplinary education. He shares praise for mentors, peers, and the campus-community radio station KDVS, before outlining the thematics of his senior thesis, Tomboy Ballet. Smith then reads three poems, “Duplex,” “Mine/Chicago,” and “Afterlife Poem.”

Born in the fog of San Francisco, Nicolette Daskalakis is a poet, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary artist based in Paris. Her writing has been anthologized by HarperCollins, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and published in numerous literary journals. Nicolette is the author of multiple poetry books, including Tell Me I'm Not On Fire (2024) and Portrait of Your Ex Assembling Furniture (2018). She holds a BA in Film & Television Production from the USC School of Cinematic Arts and an MFA from the institut supérieur des arts et du design de Toulouse.

Dyson Smith is a recent Statistics, English, and Sociology Graduate from the University of California, Davis. He was awarded the Herbert A. Young Award as the College of Letters and Science’s Medalist, given to the graduating senior they determine the most outstanding. His honors thesis in Poetry, Tomboy Ballet recently won the Lois Ann Lattin prize for UC Davis’s Best Honors Creative Writing Project. Poems from the collection have been published in journals such as Open Ceilings, Poet News, GTFO Poetry’s 2024 Anthology of Sacramento Poets, Euphemism and The Madison Review. Beyond poetry, Dyson is a social statistician who wrote his research thesis on the association between social proximity to gun violence and chronic health conditions in California. He has worked on other projects pertaining to housing insecurity in Davis and deaths of despair among formerly incarcerated persons. In the past school year, Dyson was a Community-Coordinator and DJ at the campus and community radio station KDVS, a researcher at the UC Davis Innovations and Research Lab, the producer of Dr. Andy’s Poetry and Technology Hour, a data analyst for Davis's Data Driven Change Club, and a submissions reader for the literary magazine Open Ceilings. His mom owned a bike shop in Chicago.

June 20th we will be taking a Summer Break from Poetry Night. Please plan to join us on every subsequent first and third Thursday of the month at 7PM at the John Natsoulas Gallery for the Poetry Night Reading Series.

Find out more about Dr. Andy's Poetry Night Reading Series in Davis, California by visiting http://www.poetryindavis.com. Invite your friends to sign up for the mailing list. To learn more about Dr. Andy’s tiny media fiefdom, subscribe to his weekly newsletter at https://andyjones.substack.com.