While You Wait is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Karoff Family Poetry Fund, the SB Poetry Fund, the Helen Foundation, the Simon and Diana Raab Foundation, Luci Janssen, and J. Alfred Roofrock.
Santa Barbara Poet Laureate Laure-Anne Bosselaar's idea for the While You Wait project evolved to include 80 Santa Barbara Country writers, from young students to awarded poets, an unprecedented print run, a companion website, and posters in local medical offices and busses. So far, we have been able to donate over 1,750 copies of the book to healthcare heroes at Sansum Clinic.
Gunpowder Press is a small, independent poetry press, published by David Starkey and co-edited by David Starkey and Chryss Yost. We are grateful for our partnership with Sansum Clinic in celebration of the 100th anniversary (with special thanks to Jill Fonte, who heroically responded while in the midst of an unprecedented health crisis), Santa Barbara MTD, and the Santa Barbara County Office of Arts & Culture. The Santa Barbara Poet Laureate program has helped lift the profile of poetry in our community and the scope of our goals in new and exciting ways.
As we created this companion website for the While You Wait anthology, we added even more poems. We created it so that visitors to medical offices can safely read poems on their own devices (in fact, you can read these poems anywhere you like—we don't mind!). In addition, posters in Santa Barbara's MTD busses allow anyone riding the bus to scan a QR code to easily access these poems by local poets. This project is a gift of gratitude from our poets to our entire community. We hope they speak to you.
If you would like to donate to support future community poetry projects, please consider a gift to the SB Poetry Fund, managed by the Santa Barbara Foundation (your donations are tax-deductible).