Sally Ashton is a poet, writer, Editor-in-Chief of the DMQ Review, college professor emerita, lecturer, blogger, and workshop presenter who has taught well over 100 workshops. She was appointed the second Santa Clara County Poet Laureate, 2011-2013. She has collaborated with both visual artists and musicians. She is Assistant Editor of They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing, Black Lawrence Press, 2018. Work was included in A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poetry, 2019 MadHat Press.
Her fourth collection, The Behaviour of Clocks was released April 1, 2019 from WordFarm Press.
Her book of poems, These Metallic Days was published in 2005 as part of Main Street Rag’s Editor’s Choice Chapbook Series.
Her second chapbook, Her Name Is Juanita, was published as a special project by Kore Press in 2009, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the press.
Her first full-length collection, Some Odd Afternoon, was released February, 2010 by BlazeVOX Books. Selections were nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2011 by Jennifer K. Sweeney. A review by Dean Rader appears at Rattle online.
Two poems from 2010 issues of DMQ Review, which she edits, were chosen for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2011, by guest editor Kevin Young, fall 2011.
Ashton was awarded a fellowship at Prospect Street Writers House and a Lucas Artist Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center as well as an Arts Council Silicon Valley Artist Fellowship, Poetry, 2005. Besides nominations listed above, Ashton was also a 2006 and 2001 Pushcart Prize nominee, and a finalist for Best of the Net 2007.
She won First Prize in the 2014 Fish Flash Fiction Contest from Fish Publishing, Dublin, Ireland.
She was the founding director of the California Poets Festival in San Jose(2007 & 2008) which was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Writing across genres and specializing in short forms, Ashton has published in Orion and Sentence: a journal of prose poetics, and currently in such journals as Axon, the museum of americana, Brevity, Los Angeles Review of Books, Rattle, Poetry Flash, Poet Lore, and Zyzzyva. Work appears in A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poetry; the textbook anthology, An Introduction to the Prose Poem; in Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes; and in best-seller Poems for the 99 Percent among others. She has been a guest-blogger for the Best American Poetry blog.
Sally earned her MFA in Poetry and Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars, 2003, taught creative writing for ten years at her undergrad alma mater, San José State University, where she is now Faculty Emerita. She teaches privately in-person and online and has taught in programs such as Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal, among others. A full CV of appearances is available and includes Moe’s Books, Berkeley for Poetry Flash; Frank Pictures Gallery in Santa Monica; the Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, CA; KGB Bar, NYC; and as a SJSU University Scholar. See Calendar for recent dates.
Ashton as poet laureate was featured in a segment on NBC News.
Contact: sally.ashton@sjsu.edu
Facebook: Sally Ashton
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