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amber west
slo native, poet and teacher By Will Jones
What thoughts I have of you tonight, California, as I walk along moon slush streets with a heartache watching the hail pebble down – from “A Dollar Store on Flatbush” There are so many voices eager to be heard in San Luis Obispo native Amber West’s second poetry collection, Hen and God, you can almost hear the din before you open the cover. The voices include a poem, a pregnant woman, a daughter, a sister, a jilted lover, a pirate, a city, a grieving friend, all of them with a powerful story and a unique perspective on life. I have been reading and writing poetry for over fifty years. Hen and God is as exhilarating and dynamic as any collection I have encountered. At times it literally left me breathless. On Friday, December 15th, at 7:00 PM, Amber will hold a hometown book launch and signing at The Palm Theatre, featuring SLO native and resident artists including Amber, poet Will Jones, puppeteer Zeb West, storyteller Mark Sitko, visual artist Clovis Blackwell, and D E C E M B E R
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Journal PLUS
musician Jerime Ford. Amber’s husband, actor Sam West, and their three-year-old son, Luke, will also attend. You can learn more about the event, Puppets and Poets, an evening of revelry celebrating the publication of Hen and God, at http://amberiwest.com. Amber, who teaches writing at UCLA, was born in San Luis Obispo in 1977. Her mother Anita’s family, originally from Tennessee, moved from Oklahoma when Anita was a high school freshman. Her father, who was teaching at the University of Oklahoma, accepted an offer to teach poultry science at Cal Poly. “My mother and her two older brothers, Steve and Bob, went to SLOHS. They were musicians and played in a local band, Park Hotel. Steve is still a musician, working in Las Vegas. Bob, who served in Vietnam, died in a motorcycle accident in 1979,” Amber said. Lloyd Skiles, Amber’s father, moved to San Luis Obispo from the Bay area with his family, which originally came from Oklahoma. He and his brothers, Dennis and Jim, attended Mission High School. “I’ve always felt a relationship with the South. I couldn’t place it, but I felt like we were different in a homogenous community. My early writing was about processing things I was hearing but not fully understanding.” Along with the South and California, Amber added a third cultural influence when she moved to the east coast for graduate school. “It was then that I understood my California voice was strongest in my writing, how Californian I was.” Amber’s parents never married and she grew up primarily with her mother and her brother, Zeb, mostly on their own, but sometimes