Meet Don Kingfisher Campbell | Poet and Editor

We had the good fortune of connecting with Don Kingfisher Campbell and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Don Kingfisher, is your business focused on helping the community? If so, how?
Spectrum Publishing provides places for poets and artists to get their work shared and seen. Originally christened the San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly in 1998; for 16 years, I, as the host of the Saturday Afternoon Poetry series in Pasadena, California, simply wanted to get poets together at the Santa Catalina Branch Library to share and perform their poetry and create friendships, publishing their works in a saddle-stapled paper zine. The Quarterly also became a treasured historical item documenting this burgeoning SGV poetry scene. Many local poets were first published in SGVPQ. In 2015, after I fell into a little money, SGVPQ was rechristened Spectrum, now a perfect-bound journal, to signify the new magazine’s continued total inclusiveness. It has always been the policy of this editor to never turn down a poet or artist, to always choose their best work, so they can be exposed to others, both to be influenced and to influence each other. Alliances formed, new groups were born. Poets came and went and came back again to their first literary home. As Spectrum, our sights have been set higher to include any poet and artist from around the world. Copies have always been free for the authors, additional copies were $5, eventually $10 (because of the growth of size of the magazine). When my funds ran out I took on a managing editor to raise funds through subscriptions. That has worked very well, $40 for an annual subscription, and even, unsolicited, major donors, who gave $500, $1,000, $1,500 to keep us publishing. Spectrum has become a respected literary and artistic journal.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
My poetry has always been my personal diary of the people and places I have known. When I graduated from California State University of Los Angeles (CSULA) back in 1983, I could thank them for first publishing me in the school’s literary journal, Statement, and for giving me the opportunity to become its editor. These opportunities paved the way for my poetic career. I sought out places to read my poetry and publications to be published in. In 1985 I joined the Urban Mobile Poets, a poetry performing troupe and started my career as an instructor in Occidental College’s Upward Bound program. It was there I was introduced to the California Poets In The Schools program (CPITS) by my first guest poet. I was a poet-in-residence in schools for 22 years and became their Los Angeles Area Coordinator from 1994-1998. In 1996 I was offered to take over as host at Grounds Zero in Burbank and took Mike Carlin’s poetry workshop class in Pasadena. When Mike left in 1998 for a professorship in the eastern U.S., I continued his workshop and incorporated my reading series into the same location. Being an instructor at Oxy UB, I invited poets to read and perform for my classes. Some called me the one man poetry scene and a poetry guru. In 2000, I co-founded the San Gabriel Valley Poetry Festival and have continued being its organizer to this day. In 2013, I earned my Master’s Degree of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Antioch University, Los Angeles and taught in the Upward Bound program at the University of Southern California (USC). My journey has been very rewarding over the last 40 years: publishing, performing, and teaching. I have won poetry awards along the way and given out poetry awards as editor of the San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly (1998-2014) and Spectrum (2015-present).

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Being a poet (and considering this to be a post-pandemic question), this task will be easy. I will take my poor friend to poetry readings around the southland and visit iconic locations in the same areas: Beyond Baroque (Venice Beach, Abbott-Kinney), The World Stage (Leimert Park, the Watts Towers), and the Santa Catalina Branch Library (Pasadena Museums, Eaton Canyon) for starters; also places to eat and enjoy near these areas as well: Tommy’s Burgers, California Donuts, the Griffith Observatory, the Rose in Pasadena (actually a concert venue), La Tuna Canyon (for some picturesque hiking), and, if there’s time, the many more restaurants (love to dim sum at the Five Star Seafood in San Gabriel and the Happy Family in Monterey Park, which has vegetarian curry to die for), beaches (love Seal and Long the most), theaters (the Music Center, the Hollywood Bowl, Staples Center), museums (Science, History, and Art), and commercial attractions (if they have kids) that are legendary in Southern California, then take them to my house in Alhambra to see classic foreign movies, listen to obscure but very rewarding musical artists who are criminally under-known, and get take-out from the very local Pepe’s Mexican Food and Chengdu Taste.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Gregory “G.T.” Foster, my co-host, and the managing editor for Spectrum Publishing. He has tirelessly worked and networked to keep Spectrum in the black, co-hosting readings and soliciting subscriptions to allow Spectrum to continue publishing poets and artists for an additional five years now, with no end in sight.

Website: http://spectrumpublishing.blogspot.com, http://saturdayafternoonpoetry.blogspot.com, http://dkc1031.blogspot.com

Facebook: http://facebook.com/dkcampbell