Kathabela Wilson
Secretary
439 S Catalina Ave #306
Pasadena, CA 91106 USA
Kathabela Wilson created and directs Poets on Site, Tanka Poets on Site, and Caltech Red Door Poets. She holds salons and weekly tanka meetings with her husband Rick Wilson at their home, hosts tanka performance festivals in and around Pasadena, California, and welcomes visiting poets. Kathabela performs with Rick’s accompaniment on flutes of the world in museums, galleries, libraries, and the local Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden. She has created more than thirty programs and themed anthologies containing international poets’ work. She leads the online Facebook group Tanka Poets on Site, for several years giving daily prompts for tanka writing exercises. Tanka Poets on Site was presented on the Queen Mary at the Tanka Society of America’s Tanka Sunday in 2013. She currently writes “Mapping the Artist,” a weekly interview series with poets and artists, and hosts a weekly “Poetry Corner” for ColoradoBlvd.net, where she presents many tanka poets. Kathabela (her pen name is Kath Abela Wilson) uses her patient, beautiful late mother’s Maltese maiden name (Abela) as a centerpiece and inspiration. Kathabela and Rick travel the world together to math conferences (the summer of 2014 marked their fifth trip to China and Japan). She loves her work as TSA secretary, especially because it gives her close personal contact and friendship with members, and inspiration to collaborate with them and read their work even more closely.
clear summer evening
getting ready
for the great ball
Mt. Fuji
puts on her red dress
Ekphrastia Gone Wild, 2013
inside my shadow
I feel the pull downward
lie down with long stems
of lilies naked to the pink
my legs are green
Ribbons, Fall 2013
like a painting
a blue heron . . .
my heart lifts
like a brush
full of sky
Atlas Poetica #20, 2015
