With all the work it takes to keep Red Hen Press's vibrancy alive, time with Red Hen Press founders Mark Cull and Kate Gale can be in short supply.

With this auction item, Red Hen Press founders Mark Cull and Kate Gale will come to your house and make you a homemade cherry pie. A bottle of wine, up to four guests, and the pie are provided. Have the chance to spend an evening with Kate and Mark, relax, and chat about all things literary.

Kate is excellent at making pie. When they come to your house, they will bring a selection of Red Hen books picked out especially for you. It will be a night to remember.

Winner's choice! Receive a custom poem written by either Brynn Saito or Douglas Manuel. The final poem will be specially designed and printed on a broadside by Red Hen Press. This is a truly priceless gift to give your loved ones for an anniversary, birthday, or holiday!

Brynn Saito is the author of Power Made Us Swoon (2016), The Palace of Contemplating Departure (2013), and the upcoming poetry collection Under a Future Sky. Brynn lives in Fresno, CA, where she is an Assistant Professor at California State University, Fresno and co-director of Yonsei Memory Project.

Douglas Manuel is the author of Testify and the upcoming poetry collection Trouble Funk. He is a recipient of the Dana Gioia Poetry Award and a fellowship from the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts, he is a Bayard Rustin Fellow at Whittier College and teaches at Spalding University's low-res MFA program.

Both of these authors are here today as wonderful table hosts!

Enjoy a fun and exciting rafting trip along the Kern River with Sierra South, courtesy of writer, editor, board member, and outdoor adventurer, Ann Beman. Take a much-needed outdoor vacation and leave your worries at home. This excursion can be tailored to your skill level!

This exclusive gift certificate entitles two adults to experience an exhilarating whitewater adventure that winds down narrow, rocky canyons, twists around giant boulders, and charges through tight gorges. For those taking on the full experience, this adventure offers 13 miles, 8 Class IV rapids, dozens of class III, endless pools to swim in, the perfect jump rock, and a fully catered lunch. Day trip begins at 8am and lasts 6 to 8 hours. Can be swapped for an equivalent-value, beginner-level raft trip if desired.

After their exciting day, the winners can feast on food and beverages at the Kern River Brewing Company with the $100 gift card included in this package, before relaxing into the comfort of their beds with a two-night stay for 2 people at Piazza's Pine Cone Inn where the large comfortable rooms are retro-styled, with contemporary amenities.

Winner's choice! Richard Blanco, Steve Almond, or David Mas Masumoto are available to chat one-on-one with the winner of this item for one hour over Zoom. This will be your chance to pick their brain about their work, their legacy, and whatever advice and wisdom you're hoping to gain from them! A Red Hen representative will be in touch with the winner for their selection and scheduling.

Steve Almond is the author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction, including Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country. He cohosted the Dear Sugars podcast with his pal Cheryl Strayed for four years, and teaches Creative Writing at the Neiman Fellowship at Harvard and Wesleyan.

David Mas Masumoto is an organic farmer, author, and activist. His book Epitaph for a Peach won the Julia Child Cookbook award and was a finalist for a James Beard award. He resides in a hundred-year-old farmhouse surrounded by their eighty-acre organic peach, nectarine, apricot, and raisin farm outside of Fresno, California.

Richard Blanco is the fifth presidential inaugural poet in U.S. history-the youngest, first Latino, immigrant, and gay person to serve in such a role. He has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning and NPR's Fresh Air. The Academy of American Poets named him its first Education Ambassador in 2015. Blanco has continued to write occasional poems for organizations and events such as the re-opening of the U.S. embassy in Havana.

Receive a fantastic basket full of Dead Can Dance memorabilia, AND win a Zoom meeting with former drummer Peter Ulrich!

Included in the basket:

1 signed copy of Drumming With Dead Can Dance
2 signed vinyl discs
4 signed CDs
1 signed drumstick
Signed press photos and leaflets
1 Backstage Access wristband (from a previous tour)
2 personalized signed copies of Drumming with Dead Can Dance and Parallel Adventures, Peter's upcoming memoir with Red Hen Press
1 Zoom call with Peter Ulrich, to be scheduled at both parties' convenience.

Peter Ulrich is the former drummer/percussionist (Dead Can Dance); composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist.

Through the 1980s, Ulrich was drummer/percussionist with Dead Can Dance, contributed to This Mortal Coil, and guested on other 4AD recordings. Two solo albums followed, the first with a hefty input from DCD's Brendan Perry. Then, from 2008-2019 he fronted The Peter Ulrich Collaboration, working with producer Trebor Lloyd and a host of artists from the New York scene. Peter Ulrich lives and works in the very centre of Norfolk, UK.

Coffee, Shopping, Murder, Love (hardcover)

a novel by Carlos Allende

A campy dark comedy for the angry and the disenchanted.

Gossypiin

poetry by Ra Malika Imhotep

Gossypiin is an offering towards the holding and healing of Black beings that exceed the confines of their own bodies.

Subduction

a novel by Kristen Millares Young

A lyric retelling of the troubled history of encounter in the Americas.

I Cry With Emoticons

a novel by Yuvi Zalkow

I Only Cry with Emoticons is a quirky comedy that reveals the cost of being disconnected - even when we're using a dozen apps on our devices to communicate - and an awkward man's search for real connections, on and offline.

After Rubén

poetry by Francisco Aragon

After Rubén unfolds as a decades-long journey in poems and prose, braiding the personal, the political & the historical, interspersing along the way English-language versions & riffs of a Spanish-language master: Rubén Darío.

Letters To Guns

poetry by Brendan Constantine

Letters To Guns examines the para-physical natures of love and history, at times re-imagining both.

Dementia, My Darling

poetry by Brendan Constantine

A timely book about forgetting, Dementia, My Darling constructs a thesis on life as we remember it from moment to moment.

Calamity, Joe

poetry by Brendan Constantine.

Poet Brendan Constantine hasn't crafted another "novel in verse," but a secret life revealed by poetry. Open it anywhere and be rewarded with poems that stand alone; read it from the beginning and discover the deeper context that ties every image together.

Editor, Kate Gale

Poetry editors, Blas Falconer and Vandanna Khanna

The Los Angeles Review is a literary journal of divergent literature with a West Coast emphasis.

Testify

poetry by Douglas Manuel

Testify is a book of elegiac interrogations of race in America; the poems reside in ambivalent spaces that seek a steady reconciliation between past and present, self and family, and faith and skepticism.

Presale! (will be mailed when available)
Secret Harvests

a memoir by David Mas Masumoto
artwork by Patricia Wakida

In Secret Harvests, David Mas Masumoto discovers a "lost" aunt, separated from the family due to racism and discrimination against the disabled.

Power Made Us Swoon

poetry by Brynn Saito

A lyrical journey through family legacies, silenced histories, and the possibilities of transformation, guided by the ruthless, witty, and vulnerable voice of a mythic woman warrior.

The Palace of Contemplating Departure

poetry by Brynn Saito

Brynn Saito's debut collection of poetry is about the ever-present capacity for wonder, transformation, and change.

Ursula Lake

a novel by Charles Harper Webb.

In the fast-paced, sexy, and very scary literary thriller Ursula Lake, a husband and wife trying to save their marriage and a rock musician trying to get his career back on track find big trouble, natural and possibly supernatural, in the spellbinding wilds of British Columbia.

Presale! (will be mailed when available)

You Were Watching From The Sand

short stories by Juliana Lamy

Playful, kinetic, and devastating in turn, You Were Watching from the Sand is a collection in which Haitian men, women, and children who find their lives cleaved by the interminably strange bite back at the bizarre with their own oddities. Written in a mixture of high lyricism, absurdist comedy, and Haitian cultural witticisms, this is a collection whose dynamism matches that of its characters at every beat and turn.

Presale! (will be mailed when available)

Under a Future Sky

poetry by Brynn Saito

Under a Future Sky is a gathering of generations, a performance with ghosts anchored in Brynn Saito's journey with her father to the desert prison where, over 80 years ago, her grandparents met and made a life.

Writing in the Schools

The anthology includes poetry written by students who have participated in Writing in the Schools.

Okay, Charlie, relax. You need to calm down. This is what you're gonna do: You'll fix yourself a cup of chamomile first and pop a Xanax. Then you'll light a relaxing candle, sit down, turn on the TV, and pretend you saw nothing-just until Jignesh pays the rent. That woman is dead; a few days more inside the freezer can't hurt her. Then, and only then, you will call the police.

Submerged in bed, she kept his attention, slowed his breathing, stilled his thoughts, narrowed his senses to a steady state, focused on thin blade of shoulder, pale crook of arm, valley below cheekbone, sharp ridge of lip. He wanted to bathe in her, wanted to toss their togetherness around in great handfuls. Wanted to eat the light on her skin, drink her sheen of sweat. Wanted to smoke the smell of their sex, roll it up and set it ablaze.

This ain't quite memorial

For Kenneka, Nia, Tee Tee, Chynal, Kayla, Toyin & all our kin

the heaviness in my chest knows

safety an illusive myth

every reflection in this world

is a ghost

A girl is gone and I see myself

in the shine on her lips.

She was perhaps less jaded.

or more daring. or thrown to risk

without choice. But she is gone

all the same and I feel the absence

of her smile in the way

my bed refuses to let go

each mourning.

My boss tells me it's embarrassing that I've been here for six years and I'm still at Goldfish status. Ever since we installed the gamification plug-in, he knows exactly how many Likes I've gotten from coworkers, exactly how many Comments I've made, exactly how many Best Answers and Virtual Pints of Beer I've received, exactly how many Blog Posts I've posted. He even knows how many animated cat GIFs I've giffed, which is zero. We get points assigned to these various activities and are assigned a status level based on our points. I'm a Goldfish even though some six-monthers have already leveled up to Penguin. My boss is a Blue Whale.

What represses unhomes in the sound

Who has made me what is made me

Is a voice just muscles and shape and

Breath to phrase a song boats assemble

At the mouth of the harbor mouth in

Earth you who wrote an ode to silence

Never wrote of what is silenced I did

Seek all resounding caves let the voice

Be lit all the lanterns in the new world we

Need the language of stone from string

To string quiver in the opening the garden

So beautiful Lucifer dark sun of morning

No Eden but innocence no expulsion

But after

from The Voice of Sheila Chandra

Not a scrap but a square, the size of a woman's handkerchief. A square of paper, small and white, pinned against the underside of an iron grate beneath Ellen Portinari's feet-detained there by an updraft of cool air, its scent moldy, metallic: Eau de Subway.

All but blank, that square. Its sole markings a few numbers printed by hand.

John Henry Sleeping in High Grass

Mowers miles away, mud flies on top

his hammer like they own it, his chest

cresting and falling in shapes shifting

between sunlight and leaves, black steel

his destiny, John is motion at rest,

tides of moon and waves in still waters,

suns igniting hearts of molten iron,

a hardened conviction, rose petals in rain.

Sleep is a dream, the real world a poundage,

work a sentence for being his mama's son,

the hammer in his crib, the supernatural

a drum song of woodpeckers, cow bells

in the field, heaven a home going back to

a place before the bugle call to be born.

from Spirit Boxing

"He can't see the kill but waits for the lumbering flight that follows, the extra muscle required in the wings, the dangling silhouette of a lifeless tail or paw or head skimming just above the trees. When at last he lowers the glasses, his face is calm and solemn as if to say, That's why.
And she wants to gather him into her arms then, to close his green eyes with kisses, to smooth the cool heel of her palm against his unsuspecting brow. Instead, she smiles and nods and stretches her hand. Increasingly, he takes it."

Grief : A Petition
Allison Joseph

I want to limit grief to fourteen lines,
to capture it inside a rhyming box
that I can put together, then unlock
when brave enough to claim the grief that's mine.
I want to make my sorrows small enough
that I can carry them one at a time,
assured I've made a space where they're confined, grief unrestrained too fertile, too vast and rough to go unchecked. I need to break it down, go bit by bit until I've built a space
with boundaries that wrap their way around,
like vines around a stake. I want grief bound,
hemmed in by words so I don't have to face
its clamoring, that unrestricted sound.

"I believe there are two states of being: living and living dead. This is the division between moose and taxidermied moose, majestic oaks and the hardwood floors of a Creole cottage, the curious man I was before I found Nigel and the shadowy simulacrum I became thereafter."