The best of California art, poetry, food, and wine all come together at our 3rd-annual Pairings event. Taste the fruits of Sonoma winemakers and chefs, see the art on view in the museum, and listen to live readings by our featured “Flight of Poets:” Julia Bouwsma, Joseph Rios, Sam Sax, and Melissa Stein. Sommelier Christopher Sawyer MCs with poets Tess Taylor and Hollie Hardy.

Featured Chefs

• John McReynolds, EDGE at Stone Edge Farm
• Sondra Bernstein & John Toulze, girl & the fig
• Kyle Kuklewski, Ramekins
• Ari Weiswasser, Glen Ellen Star
• Sheana Davis, The Epicurean Connection
• And special visiting chef from Mei Prefecture, Japan, Takahisa Shirakawa, courtesy of Sonoma Cultural Exchange.

Featured Wineries

• Gloria Ferrer
• Stone Edge Farm
• Eco Terreno Wines
• Dane Cellars
• Once & Future
• Garnet Wines
• Belden Barns
• Winery Sixteen 600
• Jeff Cohn Cellars

Poet Bios

Julia Bouwsma is the author of two poetry collections: Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the Poets Out Loud Prize, and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017), which recently received the 2018 Maine Literary Award. She lives and works on an off-the-grid farm in the mountains of western Maine where she serves as Book Review Editor for Connotation Press: An Online Artifact and as Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, Maine.

Joseph Rios is the author of Shadowboxing: Poems and Impersonations (Omnidawn), winner of the Before Columbus American Book Award. In 2016, his debut poetry collection was chosen by Claudia Rankine as a finalist for Omnidawn’s first book prize. Recent poems published or forthcoming in The Nation, The San Francisco Chronicle, Huizache, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of Fresno City College and the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Los Angeles.

Sam Sax is a queer, Jewish, writer & educator. The author of Madness (Penguin, 2017) winner of The National Poetry Series and ‘Bury It’ (Wesleyan University Press, 2018) winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. He’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lambda Literary, & the MacDowell Colony. He’s the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems in BuzzFeed, The Nation, The New York Times, + other journals. He’s a 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow from the Poetry Foundation and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Currently, Sam’s the poetry editor at BOAAT Press.

Melissa Stein is the author of the poetry collections Terrible Blooms (Copper Canyon Press) and Rough Honey, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, Harvard Review, New England Review, American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, and others, and she’s received awards and fellowships from the NEA, Pushcart Prize, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, and MacDowell Colony, among others. She is a freelance editor in San Francisco.