Poems That Carry Belonging: Three Poets on Memory, Identity, and Home  

Featuring three remarkable poets whose work suggests that poems themselves become vessels of belonging. Through lyric, narrative, witness, and imagination, Francesca Bell, Albert Flynn DeSilva, and Lee Herrick preserve what might otherwise disappear. Their poems remind us that belonging is rarely fixed. It is carried across generations, across borders, across the body, and into language. Each poem becomes a keepsake, inviting us to find belonging there.

Francesca Bell is the author of Bright Stain, finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award, and What Small Sound, finalist for the Julie Suk Award and recipient of an honorable mention for the Eric Hoffer Award, and the translator of Max Sessner’s Whoever Drowned Here, finalist for the Northern California Book Award, all from Red Hen Press. Her work appears in B O D Y, ELLE, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, and Rattle and has been translated into Italian, Hungarian, and Czech. She was the Marin County Poet Laureate (2023-2026) and teaches poetry and embroidery at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.

Lee Herrick is the California Poet Laureate. He is the author of four books, including In Praise of Late Wonder: New and Selected Poems. Born in Daejeon, Korea and adopted to the United States, he lives in Fresno, California.

Albert Flynn DeSilver served as Marin County's very first poet laureate from 2008-2010 and taught as a California Poet in the Schools for over a decade. His work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Columbia Poetry Review, Hanging Loose, Jubilat, Exquisite Corpse and more than 100 other literary magazines and journals Albert is the author of more than a dozen books and chapbooks including his latest "SOME VOID: New & Selected Poems 1996-2026," just out from  nonexistent press.