Sonia Greenfield + Brendan Constantine

Sonia Greenfield was born in Peekskill, NY, and has lived in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and most recently, Minneapolis, where she shares her home with her son, husband, and two rescue dogs. She has worked as a college professor, bartender, television producer, barbershop shampoo assistant, and once appeared as a dating show contestant. She has a deep enthusiasm for dogs, children, dance parties, beaches & mountains, detective fiction, 80s New Wave, fussy bourbons, the NYT crossword puzzle and The New Yorker. An activist and political volunteer, Greenfield has been the director of The Southern California Poetry Festival and editor of Rise Up Review. She is also a former organizer of UW-Seattle MFA Prom from 2002-2004, because dressing fancy is fun even though most days now are spent in mom-jeans. She knows how to throw an amazing dog birthday party, complete with peanut butter cake and the neighborhood parrots as guests, and she can decorate a child’s birthday cake to look like a real aquarium populated with sharks. That’s four sheet cakes stacked. To-scale. Greenfield is tenderhearted and believes in the inherent goodness of humans while also understanding that they can convince themselves, through a series of mental acrobatics, that good is bad and vice versa. Above all, she believes that kindness is a neutralizer for many character flaws. 

Brendan Constantine was born in Los Angeles, the second child of actors Michael Constantine and Julianna McCarthy. An ardent supporter of Southern California’s poetry communities and one of its most recognized poets, he has served as a teacher of poetry in local schools and colleges since 1995.

His first collection, ‘Letters to Guns,’ was released in February 2009 from Red Hen Press to wide acclaim. This was followed in 2011 by ‘Birthday Girl With Possum,’ under the performance based publisher Write Bloody, and established Mr. Constantine as a poet equally at home on the page and the stage.  His work can be found in many of the nation’s standards, including Poetry, Tin House, Best American Poetry, Poem-a-Day, Virginia Quarterly, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Field, Chautauqua, and Poetry Daily. His most recent collections are ‘Dementia, My Darling’ (2016) from Red Hen Press and ‘Bouncy Bounce’ (2018), a chapbook from Blue Horse Press. 

Mr. Constantine has received support from the Getty Museum, James Irvine Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A popular performer, Brendan has presented his work to audiences throughout the U.S. and Europe, also appearing on NPR’s All Things Considered, TED ED, numerous podcasts, and YouTube. He currently teaches creative writing at the Windward School.

In addition, he brings poetry workshops to veterans, hospitals, foster care centers, & shelters for the homeless. He is also very proud of his work with the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project. Since 2017, he has been working with speech pathologist Michael Biel to develop the first poetry workshop for people dealing with Aphasia.

His sister Thea Constantine is a novelist and teacher in Portland, Oregon.

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