Rick Lupert has been involved with poetry in Los Angeles since 1990. He is the recipient of the 2017 Ted Slade Award, and the 2014 Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center Distinguished Service Award, a 2 time Pushcart Prize Nominee, and a Best of the Net nominee. He served a co-director of the Valley Contemporary Poets for 2 years, and created the Poetry Super Highway ( http://poetrysuperhighway.com/ ). Rick also hosted the weekly Cobalt Cafe reading for almost 21 years. His first spoken word album "Rick Lupert Live and Dead" featuring 25 studio and live tracks was released in March, 2016. He’s authored 22 collections of poetry, including “Beautiful Mistakes”, “God Wrestler”, “Donut Famine”, "Professor Clown on Parade", "Romancing the Blarney Stone", “Making Love to the 50 Foot Woman”, “The Gettysburg Undress” (Rothco Press) and “Nothing in New England is New”, and edited the anthologies “A Poet’s Siddur”, “Ekphrastia Gone Wild”, “A Poet’s Haggadah” and the noir anthology “The Night Goes on All Night. He also writes and draws (with Brendan Constantine) the daily web comic “Cat and Banana” and writes the Jewish Poetry column “From the Lupertverse” for http://www.JewishJournal.com/. He has been lucky enough to read his poetry all over the world.