The name Canyon Wren Writing honors a small, often hidden, bird with a distinctive voice. Catherine and David are writers and educators, both recently retired from full-time college teaching, who dreamed up Canyon Wren Writing as a way to keep doing what they love most: helping students to discover and strengthen their unique voice. They hope to inspire those who may not yet feel confident about coming out from the shadows to sing their songs. For more information, email us at canyonwrenwriting@gmail.com.
Catherine Abbey Hodges is the author of In a Rind of Light (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2020); Instead of Sadness, selected by Dan Gerber for the 2015 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize from Gunpowder Press; Raft of Days (Gunpowder Press, 2017); and the chapbooks A Spell for What Comes Next (Miramar Editions, 2018) and All the While (Finishing Line Press, 2006). Her poems appear widely in venues including Narrative, The Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, Miramar, The American Journal of Poetry, Connotation Press, Cider Press Review, Atticus Review, SWWIM, and Chicago Quarterly Review. They’ve been anthologized, featured on The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Orison Anthology, and Best of the Net. An award-winning teacher, Catherine served on the English faculty of Porterville College for 20 years before retiring in 2021. She writes, edits, teaches privately, and collaborates with musician and labyrinth-maker Rob Hodges in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada.
David Starkey served as Santa Barbara’s 2009-2011 Poet Laureate. He is Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Barbara City College and the Publisher and Co-editor of Gunpowder Press. Over the past thirty years, he has published ten full-length collections of poetry with small presses and more than 500 poems in literary journals such as American Scholar, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner and Southern Review. As an educator, he has written and edited a number of books, most recently Hello, Writer and Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief (4th edition), both published by Bedford/St. Martin’s in 2021. David is also a founding editor of the California Review of Books and the host of Santa Barbara’s Creative Community.