Blue Whale Reading Series, featuring poets Sean Colletti and George Yatchisin. Wednesday, March 11, 5:30 pm, Unity of SB Chapel, 227 E. Arrellaga. Limited open mic to follow featured readers.

Sean Colletti is a poet, producer and educator from Camarillo, California. He received his PhD in poetry from the University of Birmingham (UK). His first chapbook, Saeculum, was published by Bare Fiction in 2018. As a founding member of the Second City Poets collective, Sean was commissioned by Verve Poetry Festival to develop a spoken word show, Playground, which also ran at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and was published as a full-length collection with Verve Poetry Press. He is a multi-winner of the UK’s intercollegiate team poetry slam, representing Birmingham as a performer and coach, and a winner of Dublin’s Slam Sunday. He is currently Events Coordinator at Studio Channel Islands Art Center in Camarillo, where he programs the Poetry in the Gallery series and serves as director of the Ventura County Poetry Festival. Sean is also a committee member for the Ventura County Poet Laureateship and is in the process of establishing a small press, Channel Poetry Press, which will launch in March of 2026.

George Yatchisin is Santa Barbara Poet Laureate, 2025-2027, and the author of the chapbook Feast Days (Flutter Press 2016) and the full length The First Night We Thought the World Would End (Brandenburg Press 2019). His poems have been published in numerous journals including Antioch Review, Askew, and Zocalo Public Square. He is the co-editor of the anthologies Big Enough for Words: Poems and vintage photographs from California’s Central Coast (Gunpowder Press 2021) and Rare Feathers: Poems on Birds & Art (Gunpowder Press 2015), and his poetry appears in several anthologies including California Fire & Water: A Climate Anthology (Story Street Press 2020), Reel Verse: Poems About the Movies (Everyman’s Library 2019), and Clash by Night (City Lit Press 2015).As a journalist he has worked for outlets like KCET Food Blog, Sunset, Santa Barbara Independent, and Edible Santa Barbara. His work also appears in the anthology I’ll Tell You Mine: Thirty Years of Nonfiction from the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program (University of Chicago Press 2015). Yatchisin has an MFA and MA/W from the University of Iowa and a MA from the Johns Hopkins University.