Jamie Armstrong
Jamie Armstrong grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area where he climbed oak trees and ran in the foothills. During high school, he developed curiosity about nature and natural processes in comparison with the ways of society. He also visited Mendocino with more than 40 fellow students when he wrote poetry and photographed the town and Portuguese Beach. Jamie became a career teacher. At Menlo College, he taught English and coached cross-country running, then established a college-wide learning assistance program. For 24 years at Boise State University, he directed a reading and study strategies program and was its lead teacher.
Now living on the Mendocino Coast, Jamie writes poetry, bicycles almost daily, and photographs the forest, town, and sea. His photographs of present-day Mendocino appear in A Mendocino Remembrance ca. 1942, which was published by the Kelley House Museum in 2023. Jamie’s recent poems were published in several anthologies, which include What Would You Call this Gem of a Forest and What Unites Us: Democracy, the Constitution, and Rule of Law.
Mike Edwards
Born 1944, Alexandria Louisiana. Then his family was forced to immigrate by harsh economic circumstances and an asthmatic young boy needing a dry climate, moving from the lush green of Louisiana to the barren plains of the Permian Basin.
He attended collage at Arizona State University where he studied Philosophy. He did not graduate and then traveled to San Francisco where he found a home. After years of hard work and later heavy drinking he recovered and began his carrier in poetry at the age of forty-four. It was his great fortune to have met Jack Gilbert shortly after, who Mike befriended and who was most generous with his time and poetic drive and influential in his growth as a poet.