Santa Barbara crowns a new poet laureate

With great novelists like TC Boyle, Sue Grafton and Ross McDonald, Santa Barbara is well known for its fiction writers. But since 2005, the city has been been promoting poets as well, with the creation of the Santa Barbara Poet Laureate Program. The job of the laureate is to become a spokesperson for the city’s literary community, and help spread poetry across the region. Santa Barbara recently crowned a new poet laureate, Belgian-born Laure-Anne Bosselaar. She reads from her book of poetry, “These Many Rooms.”

Laure-Anne Bosselaar is the author of These Many Rooms, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, Small Gods of Grief, and A New Hunger, an ALA Notable Book. She is the winner of the 2001 Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry.