Visit: http://pigsquash.wordpress.com/ for details on Kim Goldberg's latest book: RED ZONE... a stunning collection of poems, images, journal entries and artist projects on homelessness, drug addiction and urban decay in downtown Nanaimo.

Kim Goldberg's issue-oriented writing on politics, media, and environment has appeared in Macleans, Canadian Geographic, Nature Canada, This Magazine, Georgia Straight, The Progressive, Columbia Journalism Review, BBC Wildlife Magazine and numerous other magazines plus her four nonfiction books. After signing up for a T'ai Chi class and subsequently lapsing into a mysterious "T'ai Chi coma" for several years, she revived in 2005 writing nothing but poetry. Her post-coma output has appeared in The Capilano Review, Cimarron Review, Prism International, Event The Dalhousie Review, The New Quarterly, Rampike, The Arabesques Review, Istanbul Literary Review, Voices Israel and many other literary magazines and anthologies around the world. Born and raised in Oregon, with a biology degree from University of Oregon, Kim came to Canada with her family during the Vietnam War years. She inhabits a 1930s coal-miner's cottage in downtown Nanaimo, BC. When a shrubby lot on her block was bulldozed for condo development revealing a homeless encampment, she responded by organizing and curating the Urban Eyes Art Exhibition in 2006, featuring the work of 52 local artists and architects on the theme of urban development. 

Kim has organized coffeehouses and other Nanaimo events for Poets Against War and for Writers Against the War. A frequent performer at local spoken word events, Kim also co-hosts a periodic Urban Poetry Cafe on Radio CHLY, reading poems from Guantanamo detainees, the Cuban Five, Iraqi and Palestinian poets and other marginalized voices. In 2008, she began creating "Poem Galleries" in vacant downtown storefronts to feature the work of local poets. http://www.ascentaspirations.ca/kimgoldbergstorefront.htm

Her 2007 poetry collection, Ride Backwards On Dragon, http://www.leafpress.ca/Books_Trade/Goldberg_Pages/Ride%20Backwards%20on%20Dragon.htm traces her journey into and out of silence through a series of 66 poems structured around the 1,000-year-old martial art she has been studying - Liuhebafa. In a series of endnotes she decodes the Taoist symbolism of the ancient titles of the 66 movements. The book was shortlisted for Canada's Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for poetry.

Her latest collection is RED ZONE - poems of homelessness and urban decay.