Susan Suntree is an award-winning poet, performer, essayist, and environmental activist whose recent books of poetry included Dear Traveler and the updated paperback and audiobook release of her non-fiction epic poem Sacred Sites: The Secret History of Southern California. This book won the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association Award for Nonfiction, the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Narrative Poetry, a Mellon Foundation Elemental Arts Award, and was a finalist for a Society of Voice Arts and Sciences prize. Other books include Eye of the Womb, also published in Madrid as a bilingual edition, El Ojo de la Matriz; Tulips, a bilingual chapbook of translations of poetry by Spanish poet Ana Rossetti; Rita Moreno, YA biography; Wisdom of the East; Stories of Compassion, Inspiration and Love for which the Dalai Lama wrote the foreword.

The evening will begin with a dinner in our fellowship hall followed by the program in our Sanctuary.

Join Raven and Coyote as they guide us all on a tour through the primordial origins of Southern California beginning with the Big Bang/Great Silence to the present. This is the story told in Sacred Sites: The Secret History of Southern California. Equal parts Western science and Native American myths and songs, Sacred Sites tells a dynamic and poetic tale about the Southern California landscape, reflecting the riches of both Native and Western thought. Included in the presentation is a full-color slide show of images taken by renowned photographer, Juergen Nogai. Sacred Sites is urban epic about the city's extraordinary natural history and Native American heritage. Knowing this story lets us see right through the cement to the homeland we all share. No one who knows its story can see the Southern California the same way.