RJA Conference 2017 is only two months away! This time the annual conference will be taking place at Robinson Jeffers’ alma mater, Occidental College, in Los Angeles, California. Mark your calendars: Friday, February 24 to Sunday, February 26.

Robinson Jeffers spent nearly a decade in Los Angeles, living most of his collegiate years there. He also met his highly influential wife-to-be there. Entries in the Carmel Pine Cone show that for a couple years after Robin and Una Jeffers moved to Carmel, they were still regarded residents of Pasadena. They spent the summer of 1915 in Pasadena and their twin boys were born in Pasadena in late 1916. The Jeffers did not settle in Carmel until 1917.

There is a sense in which Jeffers was a Southern California poet, though he wrote little of value there. It might be said that his poetry was in one aspect a rejection of his Angeleno years, but even as such might have been impossible without his Angeleno years.