On the 8/20/25 edition of Dr. Andy’s Poetry and Technology Hour:

Dyson Kona Smith joins the program to talk about his post-graduate life, poetry, and his next steps. He outlines a desire to publish his manuscript, Tomboy Ballet, and reads an untitled poem and “Lai about Home Followed By Analysis.” Smith also shares that he is now a Data Analyst for Turning Point Community Programs, helping evaluate programs tailored to help Northern Californians on their recovery journeys. The next guest on the hour is Roman Spinale. Roman discusses leveraging social media as a tool to propel his comedy career, before sharing about an upcoming Fair Oaks event on Friday, August 22nd “Comedy Under the Stars,” which will start at 8:00 P.M. and feature great comedians far and wide.

Dyson Kona Smith is a recent Statistics, English, and Sociology Graduate from the University of California, Davis. He was awarded the Herbert A. Young Award as the College of Letters and Science’s Medalist, given to the graduating senior they determine the most outstanding. His honors thesis in Poetry, Tomboy Ballet recently won the Lois Ann Lattin prize for UC Davis’s Best Honors Creative Writing Project. Poems from the collection have been published in journals such as but not limited to Open Ceilings, Poet News, GTFO Poetry’s 2024 Anthology of Sacramento Poets, Euphemism and The Madison Review. Beyond poetry, Dyson is a social statistician who wrote his research thesis on the association between social proximity to gun violence and chronic health conditions in California. He has worked on other projects pertaining to housing insecurity in Davis and deaths of despair among formerly incarcerated persons. Dyson was previously a Community-Coordinator and DJ at the campus and community radio station KDVS, a Researcher at the UC Davis Innovations and Research Lab, and the producer of Dr. Andy’s poetry and technology hour.

For over a decade Roman has been entertaining audiences with his signature brand of clean and introspective comedy. Today Roman can be seen regularly opening for Jay Leno, as well as touring dates across comedy clubs, corporate events, and private gatherings.

The Poetry Night Reading Series takes place on first and third Thursdays of the month at 7 PM, is generously supported by the people and poets of the Sacramento Valley, by John Natsoulas, Robby Nykodym, and by members of the staff at the John Natsoulas Gallery. Your host will be Dr. Andy Jones, the poet laureate emeritus of the City of Davis.

Find out more about Dr. Andy's Poetry Night Reading Series in Davis, California by visiting http://www.poetryindavis.com. Invite your friends to sign up for the mailing list. To learn more about Dr. Andy’s tiny media fiefdom, subscribe to his weekly newsletter at https://andyjones.substack.com.

Atim Udoffia is the first guest on the program, detailing her storied career in theatre. She speaks on her upcoming event, an adaptation of William Shakespeare's As You Like it which will show the weekends of August 22nd and August 30th at the CLARA auditorium in Sacramento. Brad Buchanon is the second guest of the hour. Buchanon discusses chess, his medical memoir, and excitingly his upcoming novel Spy's Gate. He shares his writing process, some of the thematic inspirations for the novel, including The Queen's Gambit, and the self-titled poem for his next poetry collection.

Atim Udoffia is a theatre artist and a mother of two working in theatre and film/video in the Sacramento and Bay Area. While continuing to expand her body of work as an actor and director, Udoffia aims to build a creative pipeline enabling trained, experienced theatre artists to initiate projects and generate their own creative opportunities. Favorite stage roles include Emilie in EMILIE LA MARQUISE DU CHATELET DEFENDS HER LIFE TONIGHT (The Stage @ Burke Junction), Lady Macbeth (STC), and Rosalind in AS YOU LIKE IT, which she also adapted and produced. Udoffia’s film credits include the feature films No Address, Fairyland, and Where Sleeping Dogs Lie. As a director, her work includes the solo show MINE FOR THE TRIBE, DANNY AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA, OTHELLO, and the one-act CHARLIE AND NELL, for which she received a Best Director Award. Udoffia earned a BA in Human Biology from Stanford University before pursuing acting training in London and Los Angeles.

Brad Buchanon’s poetry, short fiction, and scholarly articles have appeared in more than 200 literary journals. He has published four book-length collections of poetry, most recently Chimera (Finishing Line Press, 2022). Buchanan has also published three academic books, most recently ’Indict the Author of Affection’: Affectation and Catachresis in Hamlet (McGill-Queens University Press, 2023). His medical memoir, Living with Graft-Versus-Host-Disease, was published by Armin Lear Press in 2021. Spy's Mate, his historical chess-espionage thriller set in the late Cold War Soviet Union, will be published this fall.

The Poetry Night Reading Series takes place on first and third Thursdays of the month at 7 PM, is generously supported by the people and poets of the Sacramento Valley, by John Natsoulas, Robby Nykodym, and by members of the staff at the John Natsoulas Gallery. Your host will be Dr. Andy Jones, the poet laureate emeritus of the City of Davis.

Find out more about Dr. Andy's Poetry Night Reading Series in Davis, California by visiting http://www.poetryindavis.com. Invite your friends to sign up for the mailing list. To learn more about Dr. Andy’s tiny media fiefdom, subscribe to his weekly newsletter at https://andyjones.substack.com.

On the 8/6/25 edition of Dr. Andy’s Poetry and Technology Hour:

Partners Robin Ekiss and Keith Ekiss are the first guests on the program. A former colleague of Dr.Andy’s, Robin reflects on her time at UC Davis, mentored by poets such as Sandra McPherson and Sandra Gilbert. Keith discusses his recent book, Burial Fragments, which co-won the Barry Sparks Poetry Prize for 2024 from Gunpowder Press. He describes the collection as his “San Francisco book report,” documenting change in the city since the dot-com bubble. They then both share poems, with Robin reading “The bird of God.” and Keith reading a piece titled “Explaining Shockley.” The next guest on the show is Santi Elijah Holley, who describes his recent publication in the New York Times column Letters of Recommendations, “I don’t believe in God I believe in Gospel music.” He describes his journey with gospel music, and how he came upon the genre later in life. Holley credits listening to music from a critical lens as a reason why he was able to become a successful writer, writing an award winning book about the Shakur family. He recommends the gospel songs “Previous Lord Take my Hand,” “How I Got Over” and “Sit down Servant."

Robin Ekiss earned her MA in creative writing from UC Davis so many years ago that Dr. Andy was actually one of her graduate student colleagues. A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, she’s the author of The Mansion of Happiness, winner of the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize and a finalist for the Northern California Book Awards. Her poems and prose have appeared inThe Atlantic, POETRY, APR, and elsewhere. She’s a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award for emerging women writers, and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony for the Arts, and Headlands Center for the Arts.

Keith Ekiss is the author of two collections of poetry — Burial Fragments, co-winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize for 2024 from Gunpowder Press — and Pima Road Notebook (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2010), a book about growing up on the edge of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community in Arizona. As a translator, his works include The Fire’s Journey (Tavern Books, 2019), an epic poem by the Costa Rican writer Eunice Odio in four volumes and Territory of Dawn: The Selected Poems of Eunice Odio, published in 2016 by The Bitter Oleander Press. He has been a lecturer in the Creative Writing program at Stanford since 2007.

Santi Elijah Holley is an award-winning journalist and a recipient of the 2019 Robert B. Silvers grant for Work in Progress, and a 2017 Oregon Literary Fellowship for nonfiction. His 2023 nonfiction book, An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created, was selected as a New York Times Editors' Choice, an NPR selection for “Books We Love,” "Best Book of the Year" by Kirkus Reviews, and longlisted for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. His book on Black American independent cinema is forthcoming by Mariner Books. He lives in Los Angeles.

The Poetry Night Reading Series takes place on first and third Thursdays of the month at 7 PM, is generously supported by the people and poets of the Sacramento Valley, by John Natsoulas, Robby Nykodym, and by members of the staff at the John Natsoulas Gallery. Your host will be Dr. Andy Jones, poet laureate emeritus of the City of Davis. Robin and Keith Ekiss will read at the 8/7/25 iteration of Poetry in Davis.

Find out more about Dr. Andy's Poetry Night Reading Series in Davis, California by visiting http://www.poetryindavis.com. Invite your friends to sign up for the mailing list. To learn more about Dr. Andy’s tiny media fiefdom, subscribe to his weekly newsletter at https://andyjones.substack.com.