Chryss Yost is a Santa Barbara Poet Laureate who served from 2013-2015. She was awarded the 2013 Patricia Dobler Poetry Prize, and many other honors including multiple Pushcart Prize nominations.
Chryss is co-editor and designer at Gunpowder Press, an independent literary 501(c)(3) based in Santa Barbara, California. Gunpowder is part of the legend of Saint Barbara.
Chryss’s poems have been included in the most popular poetry textbooks in the country and widely anthologized elsewhere. Poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, Quarterly West, and Solo as well as other national and international publications.
Chryss has edited many anthologies, including California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (with Dana Gioia and Jack Hicks) and Poetry Daily: A Year of Poems for the World’s Most Popular Poetry Website, edited with Poetry Daily founders Dianne Boller and Don Selby.
A former California Poet in the Schools, Chryss has also been a founding faculty member of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference’s Poetry Conference and the Teaching Poetry Conference in Sonoma. She taught poetry for many years at the Santa Barbara Music & Arts Conservatory.