CSPS Board of Directors
President – Maja Trochimczyk
Vice President/Communications – Richard Modiano
Vice President/Membership – Richard M. Deets
Secretary/Historian – Ambika Talwar
Treasurer – John Forrest Harrell
California Quarterly (CQ) Board of Editors
Maja Trochimczyk, Conrad Tademar Wilk
Managing Editor
Maja Trochimczyk
Board Members at Large
Monthly Contest Chair – Alice Pero
Annual Contest Chair – Maja Trochimczyk
Other CSPS Positions
Art Panel – Maura Harvey, Maja Trochimczyk
CSPS Poetry Letter Editor – Maja Trochimczyk
After a career as a mathematics teacher, Richard Deets became the Vice President – Membership of the CSPS in the fall of 2012. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Livermore Valley Opera and the City of Dublin’s Heritage and Cultural Arts Commission. His poems have appeared online in a variety of milieus. They include “Christina’s Courage,” “I Desire You,” “We Sailed on with Happy Hearts”, “I Want to Cuddle You,” and many others. Still effectively serving as a teacher, Richard’s published articles on poetry include The Elements of Poetry online at FamilyFriendPoems.com.
Terry Ehret is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Night Sky Journey. Her poems and poetry books have won a number of literary awards over the past several decades, including the National Poetry Series and the California Commonwealth Club Book Award, and four Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. With a BA from Stanford and an MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State, she has taught college and private seminars on poetry and writing for many years and presently offers workshops at the Sitting Room, a community library in Penngrove, California. Terry is one of the founders of the Sixteen Rivers poetry publishing collective in the San Francisco Bay Area; from 2004-2006 she served as Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, where she teaches writing. In the summers she leads writing-travel programs in Ireland, Wales, and Tuscany. Most recently, she edited the third issue of the CQ for 2018, Vol. 44 No. 3 (2018 Summer).
Alice Pero has recently joined the Board as an Issue Editor. She has published poetry in many magazines and anthologies, including Nimrod, National Poetry Review, River Oak Review, Poet Lore, The Alembic, North Dakota Quarterly, The Distillery, Fox Cry Review, The Griffin, and G.W. Review, and others. Her book of poetry, Thawed Stars, was praised by Kenneth Koch as having “clarity and surprises.” Pero teaches poetry and is a member of California Poets in the Schools, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering students to express their uniqueness through writing, performing and publishing their own poetry. She is also the founder of Moonday, a reading series that has been on-going in the Los Angeles area for upwards of sixteen years. Ms Pero has created dialogue poems with more than twenty poets. She also created the performing group, Windsong Players Chamber Ensemble and performs with them as a flutist.
John Forrest Harrell first published poetry as a sophomore at Harvey Mudd College and has occasionally done so over the decades since. A retired program manager and engineering executive, he continues to feed his interests as an Austrian School economist, a Celtic Catholic theologian and an information scientist. Dr. Harrell’s poems have occasionally appeared in the CQ over the better part of the last three decades; The Hand of the Midnight Moon, a collection of his poems, was published in March of 2017. He has served as the Treasurer of the CSPS for upwards of thirty years, as an editor, a proofreader and as Managing Editor of the CQ. From June of 2012 to February of 2019, he also served as the acting CSPS President. Most recently, he edited the third issue of the CQ for 2017 (Vol. 43, No. 3).
Maja Trochimczyk is a Polish American poet, music historian, photographer, and author of six books on music, most recently Frédéric Chopin: A Research and Information Guide. Dr. Trochimczyk’s seven books of poetry include Rose Always, Miriam’s Iris, Slicing the Bread, Into Light, The Rainy Bread, and two anthologies, Chopin with Cherries and Meditations on Divine Names. A former Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga, she is the founder of Moonrise Press and Board Secretary of the Polish American Historical Association. Hundreds of her poems, studies, articles and book chapters have appeared in English, Polish, and in translations. She has read papers at over 80 international conferences and is a recipient of many honors and awards from Polish, Canadian and American institutions, including the American Council of Learned Societies, the Polish Ministry of Culture, McGill University, and the University of Southern California. She last edited the fourth issue of the CQ for 2023 (Vol. 49 No. 4) and has served as the President of the Calfornia State Poetry Society and Managing Editor of the CQ since February of 2019.