Join poets and readers including Dan Bellm, Susan Griffin, Ken Haas, Jane Hirshfield, Dean Rader, Murray Silverstein and Susan Terris, in a provocative and inspiring reclamation of our country and citizenship.

Soon after the 2016 presidential election, Sixteen Rivers Press conducted a nationwide call for submissions, seeking unpublished poems that would "respond to the cultural, moral, and political rifts that now divide our country." At the same time, the poet-members of the SRP were asked to nominate poems, old or new, published or not, from poets living or dead. This bold anthology is a chorus of voices responding with dissent and consoling with praise, perspective, vision, and hope.

Sixteen Rivers Press is a shared-work, nonprofit poetry collective dedicated to providing an alternative publishing avenue for Northern California poets. Founded in 1999 by seven writers, the press is named for the sixteen rivers that flow into the San Francisco Bay. Since 2001, we have produced thirty-eight outstanding books of poetry, sharing our commitment to excellence with the poetry world.

BIOS

MURRAY SILVERSTEIN is the Senior Editor for America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience and The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed, and the author of two books of poetry, Master of Leaves and Any Old Wolf. He is a retired architect and co-author of four books on architecture, including A Pattern Language.

Dan Bellm is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Deep Well. His other books are Practice, named one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of 2008 by The Virginia Quarterly Review; Buried Treasure; One Hand on the Wheel; and Terrain (with Molly Fisk and Forrest Hamer). His honors include grants from the NEA and the California Arts Council.

Susan Griffin, a feminist poet and essayist with an abiding focus on ecology and nature, has written more than twenty books, among them Unremembered Country: Poems and Bending Home: Selected New Poems. Her landmark books of essays include Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her and Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy: On Being an American Citizen (2008).

KEN HAAS lives in San Francisco where he works in healthcare and sponsors a poetry writing program at the UCSF Children's Hospital. Ken has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has won the Betsy Colquitt Poetry Award, and his poems have appeared in over 50 journals, including Clare, Descant, Freshwater, Helix, The MacGuffin, Natural Bridge, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Quiddity and Spoon River.

In addition to her work as a freelance writer, editor, and translator, Jane Hirshfield has taught in the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars, at UC Berkeley, and at the University of San Francisco. She has been a visiting Poet-in-Residence at Duke University, the University of Alaska, the University of Virginia, and elsewhere, and has been the Elliston Visiting Poet at the University of Cincinnati. Her books of poetry include The Beauty: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), which was long listed for the National Book Award; Come, Thief (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); After (HarperCollins, 2006); and Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins, 2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Dean Rader’s first book, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. His second, Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (2017), received the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Award. Suture, a collection of collaborative poems written with Simone Muench, was also published in 2017, as was the anthology Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, which he coedited.

Susan Terris’ most recent books are Take Two: Film Studies and Memos, both from Omnidawn Publishing, and Ghost of Yesterday: New & Selected Poems (Marsh Hawk Press). She has published widely in literary journals, and her work has appeared in Pushcart Prize XXXI and Best American Poetry 2015. She is currently a poetry editor of Pedestal Magazine.