About Poet Laureate Erica Goss

Erica Goss served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos,
California from 2013-2016. She is the author
of Landscape with Womb and Paradox
(Broadstone Books, 2025). Her first poetry
collection, Night Court, won the 2016
Lyrebird Prize from Glass Lyre Press. She
is the author of Wild Place (2012,Finishing
Line Press) and Vibrant Words: Ideas and
Inspirations for Poets (2014, Pushpen Press).

As Poet Laureate for Los Gatos, she organized
the first St. Patrick’s Day Poetry Walk, created
Poems-in-the-Window (local businesses
displayed poems during National Poetry Month), recorded The Poetry Podcast
(50-plus recordings of poems in a variety of languages), established the first Los Gatos
Poet Laureate Scholarship, and launched The Poetry Kitchen, a poetry reading series
at the Los Gatos Library.

Erica’s work is featured in numerous anthologies and journals, including Colorado
Review, Georgia Review, North Dakota Review, Oregon Humanities, Pearl, The
Pedestal, diode, PRISM International, Superstition Review, The Summerset Review,
Ekphrasis, Main Street Rag, Café Review, Perigee, Redactions, Dash Literary Journal,
Eclectica, Up the Staircase, Lake Effect,Consequence, Stirrings, Convergence,
Passager, Atticus Review, Gravel, Tinderbox Review, Caveat Lector, Rattle, Zoland
Poetry, Spillway, San Pedro Rover Review, Comstock Review, Contrary, and
Innisfree Poetry Journal.

In 2023, she received a “Notable Essay” honor from Best American Essays. She
received the Zocalo Poetry Prize in 2019 and the Many Mountains Moving Prize for
poetry in 2011. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2010, 2013, 2017, 2020,
2021, and 2024, Best of the Net in 2016, 2017, 2020 and 2023, and received the first
Edwin Markham Prize for poetry, judged by California Poet Laureate Al Young. Wild
Place was also a finalist in the 2010 White Eagle Coffee Store Press Chapbook Contest,
and received a special mention from Jacar Press’s 2010 Chapbook Contest. Erica was
the host of Word to Word, a Show About Poetry, on KCAT Cable TV in Los Gatos,
and wrote The Third Form, a column about video poetry, for Connotation Press. She
is the co-founder of Media Poetry Studio, a poetry-and-film camp for teen girls. In
2018, Erica founded Girls’ Voices Matter, an arts education program for teen girls.
Erica lives in Eugene, Oregon, and teaches classes in poetry, memoir and video.

Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City 1885

–a painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner

A shadow stretches
from dune to dune,
cool valley where
tufts of grass
lean towards the ocean.

Out to sea, sails flutter like
the wings of a cabbage moth
I saw this morning in my garden,
searching for a place to lay
a last clutch of eggs
before winter closes in.

So often I have felt
like those shrubs on the beach,
bent sideways from
some elemental force,
its life-changing weight
pressing me into a new shape,

as if my heart were an object
to be molded by wind.
I offer myself as raw material,
a last chance at transformation
before the pale half-disc of sun sets
and that cloud spreads
across the sky.

First published in Two Hawks Quarterly, Spring 2024