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 the co-editor of Gunpowder Press, where she founded the Shoreline Voices Project.
Her poems have been included in the most popular poetry textbooks in the country and widely anthologized elsewhere. Poems have appeared in Askew, The Hudson Review, Quarterly West, and Solo as well as other national and international publications.
Chryss has edited two influential collections.California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present, edited with Dana Gioia and Jack Hicks, was the first major overview of the subject. Poetry Daily: A Year of Poems for the World’s Most Popular Poetry Website, edited withPoetry Daily founders Dianne Boller and Don Selby, was a groundbreaking project which confirmed the growing influence of online poetry.
A 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 teaches poetry at the Santa Barbara Music & Arts Conservatory .