The How, The Why: Lucille Lang Day And Dave Holt

The How The Why is a half-hour podcast documenting the creative process and the creative purpose hosted by Jon-Barrett Ingels. This free weekly series is an educational resource provided to discuss the evolution of literary arts with industry innovators.

Lucille Lang Day is a co-editor of the anthology Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California, which has received awards from PEN Oakland and Artists Embassy International. She has published ten poetry collections and chapbooks, including Becoming an Ancestor and Dreaming of Sunflowers: Museum Poems, which received the 2014 Blue Light Poetry Award. She is also the author of a two children’s books, Chain Letter and The Rainbow Zoo, and a memoir, Married at Fourteen, which received a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. Her poems, short stories, and essays have appeared widely in literary magazines and anthologies. The founder and director of Scarlet Tanager Books, she holds an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and a PhD in science/mathematics education from the University of California, Berkeley. She is of Wampanoag, British, and Swiss/German descent.

After high school, Dave Holt began setting his poems to music. His desire to be a composer led to a move to California to get his songs published, but he ended up in San Francisco State University’s Creative Writing Program (BA ’93, MA ’95). His poetry has been published in several journals and has won prizes in the Thomas Merton’s Poetry of the Sacred, Maggie Meyer Memorial, Dancing Poetry, and  Ina Coolbrith contests. His essay “American Indian Poets and the Mixed-Blood Experience” appeared in Raven Chronicles. His book, Voyages to Ancestral Islands, which tells the story of reuniting with his Anishinaabe Ojibwe ancestors, won a Literary/Cultural Arts Award from Artists Embassy International (San Francisco). His work has been included in three anthologies, including Red Indian Road West and Descansos, Words from the Wayside, where his contributed poem received a Pushcart Prize nomination.