Erica Goss is a poet, teacher and co-editor of Caesura, the literary magazine of Poetry Center San Jose. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, Bryant Literary Journal, Reed, Tiger’s Eye, Washington Square, River Oak Review, The Penwood Review, Ekphrasis, and Pearl, among others.

She won the first Edwin Markham Poetry Prize in 2007, judged by California’s Poet Laureate Al Young, and was a finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award. She received a James D. Phelan award and the Dorritt Sibley award, both from San Jose State, for her work in the writing and study of poetry. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from San Jose State University in 2007.

Erica was born in Germany to a family of writers and artists. She began writing poetry at an early age. Her earliest poetic influences were Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams. As a writer, Erica has a strong interest in the tension between humans and the natural world, recognizing a rough, stumbling spirituality alive in the realm of the senses. She believes the imagination is populated and re-populated only as the result of intense dedication to art, and of deliberate reversals of the ordinary.

As an educator, Erica feels that literature has the power to reach students of all ages, allowing them a means of expression both personal and universal. Within a well-written poem lie discoveries of what gives life passion and meaning. Reading and writing poetry allows artistic expression as well as experimentation with various verse forms. Erica teaches her students to trust themselves as writers while simultaneously developing a sophisticated sense of what makes a really great poem. By studying great poets, both classic and contemporary of various schools and styles, students learn techniques of writing that apply to both poetry and prose.