Events › Poetry Reading With Portola Valley Poets

San Mateo County Libraries is celebrating National Poetry Month in April. Join us at Portola Valley Library for a special event where Portola Valley poets will read from their works, share their experiences as poets, and offer some of their books for sale. Learn about different library resources available to creative writers, including in-person writers' workshops and other author events.

Short Biographies:

John Fadely is a lawyer who lived in Asia for 30 years and won the 2025 Trail to Table Book Award in Poetry for his debut collection, Before Leaving the Island. John is co-translating an illustrated edition of Tang dynasty poetry and starting Fifth Stanza Press to publish first and second books by poets in midlife or later.

Veronica Kornberg is a recipient of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize and the Wandering Aengus Book Award in Poetry. She has published widely, and her full-length collection, Strange Gift, is forthcoming in April 2026. Veronica is a Peer Reviewer for Whale Road Review, a habitat gardener, and an avid tidepool explorer.

Catherine Evans Latta has been writing poetry for over 50 years. She studied under Denise Levertov at Stanford University. Catherine's poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Stanford Literary Quarterly, Fresh Hot Bread, and numerous other journals.

Roger Sippl survived Hodgkin's Lymphoma as a teenager, 51 years ago. After graduating from Berkeley, he went on to IPO three software companies. Sippl studied creative writing at UC Irvine, UC Berkeley, and Stanford Continuing Studies. His work has appeared in dozens of journals, and he has self-published three books of poetry.