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, Co-editor of the California Review of Books, and the Publisher and Co-editor of Gunpowder Press. Over the past thirty-five years, he has published eleven full-length collections of poetry with small presses—most recently Dance, You Monster, to My Soft Song and What Just Happened: 210 Haiku Against the Trump Presidency—and more than 500 poems in literary journals such as American Scholar, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and Southern Review. His textbook, Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief (Bedford/St. Martin’s), is in its fourth edition. He is also the author of two composition textbooks: Hello, Writer: An Academic Writing Guide (Bedford/St. Martin's) and Academic Writing Now: A Brief Guide for Busy Students (Broadview). Starkey is also a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction (published in American Literary Review, in Cimarron Review, in Living Blue in the Red States, and elsewhere), and a playwright whose plays have been produced across the United States (davidstarkey.net).