First Wednesday Spoken Word Series

SHARMAN MURPHY spent part of her youth in Samoa and has deep attachment to Pacific Island culture. She has given poetry workshops and readings in Homer, AK; Hawaii; Auckland, NZ; Apia, Samoa; and a million places in California. Thirty-some years ago, she had a California Arts Council residency at a high school in Santa Cruz for high risk youth, where she had the honor of working with Skip Hawkins on a program we called “Writing to Save Your Life.” That year, she had her one and only baby. And she was also hired to teach writing at UCSC, where she ran the Writing Center, taught classes, and coordinated Writing Across the Curriculum in the Natural Sciences. Five years later, the overload wrecked her health, and she has been writing to save her life ever since. She currently resides in Hawaii.

J.T. WHITEHEAD earned a law degree from Indiana University, Bloomington. He received a Master’s degree in Philosophy from Purdue, where he studied Existentialism, social and political philosophy, and Eastern Philosophy. He spent time between, during, and after schools on a grounds crew, as a pub cook, a writing tutor, a teacher’s assistant, a delivery man, a book shop clerk, and a liquor store clerk, inspiring four years as a labor lawyer on the workers’ side. Whitehead was Editor in Chief of So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, briefly, for issues 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6. He is a Pushcart Prize-nominated short story author and poet, and was winner of the Margaret Randall Poetry Prize in 2015 (published in Mas Tequila Review). He has published over 315 poems in over 120 literary journals. His book “The Table of the Elements” was nominated for the National Book Award in 2015. He lives in Indianapolis with his two sons, Daniel and Joseph.