Great Regulars: Under the loving management of its cofounders--

WCU professor of English Michael Peich and poet and former National Endowment for the Arts head Dana Gioia--the conference has grown into one of the biggest and most prominent such gatherings in the country.

It was born in 1994, when Peich was visiting the home of Gioia's mother in Sebastopol, Calif.

"We're were sitting there, drinking some excellent wine," Peich says, "and Dana and I started talking: 'Where would somebody go if they wanted to work on craft? Prosody? Narrative?' Before long, we were saying, 'We have the stuff of a conference here.'

from John Timpane: Philadelpia Inquirer: Conference draws poets not for reading, but for crafting

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