By Khalida Sarwari
The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors has appointed San Jose State University professor Sally Ashton as the county’s second poet laureate, county officials announced Tuesday.
Ashton will begin her two-year tenure on April 1, which also marks the first day of National Poetry Month.
The poet laureate is expected to engage the community and create a poetic identity for the area, according to county officials.
Ashton said she looks forward to “building on the success of the county’s first poet laureate, Nils Peterson, to work with the community of local poets and also to engage people who may lack an appreciation of poetry’s significance to life in Silicon Valley today.”
She is the editor of the “DMQ Review,” an online poetry and art journal, as well as the author of “Some Odd Afternoon.” She has also published a prose poem collection called, “Her Name Is Juanita.”
Ashton teaches creative writing and composition at her alma mater, San Jose State University.
During the next two years, Ashton plans to engage the community in poetry-related outreach, undertake a project to make poetry more available and accessible to people in their everyday lives, and participate in National Poetry Month events and activities.