New Readings curated each Friday in April on our YouTube Channel here.
This series is part of ARC’s celebration of National Poetry Month.
These short recorded readings are carried on our website, on ARC’s YouTube channel, and shared on social media – sign up for our newsletter and you will be sent the spring 2023 readings each Friday in April!
ARCs Flash Reading Series is part of our Poetry & the Senses initiative, generously funded by Engaging the Senses Foundation. We are grateful for co-sponsorship of the 2023 Flash Readings from the Center for Race & Gender, and the Departments of English and Ethnic Studies.
Katherine Agyemaa Agard, Dodie Bellamy, Maxe Crandall, Eric Falci, Caroline Goodwin, Amanda Gunn, Ra Malika Imhotep, Mason J, Fiza Jihan, Nathalie Khankan, Ava Koohbor, Dana Koster, Angie Sijun Lou, tanea lunsford lynx, Randall Mann, Florencia Milito, Zouhair Mussa, Lucie Pereira, Katie Peterson, Atsuro Riley, Janice Lobo Sapigao, Kevin Simmonds, Darius Simpson, Maya Sisneros, Aimee Suzara, Lehua M. Taitano, & Nellie Wong, Kim Addonizio, Bahaar Ahsan, Ari Banias, William Brewer, MK Chavez, Jennifer Cheng, Lindsay Choi, Sophia Dahlin, Jennifer Foerster, C.S. Giscombe, Brenda Hillman, Jane Hirshfield, Leena Joshi, Raina Leon, Thea Matthews, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Brittany Perham, D.A. Powell, Barbara Reyes, Rachel Richardson, sam sax, Kim Shuck, Juliana Spahr, & D’mani Thomas.
HISTORY
In spring 2021, ARC piloted a new Flash Reading Series featuring two dozen Bay Area poets reading one of their poems in relation to the theme “emerge/ncy”. We were interested in what was emergent or birthed at times of crisis, the voices that become maps, guideposts, and sustenance along the way. The series was launched during 2021 National Poetry Month as part of a semester-long festival of poetry.
Over time, the series has turned into a growing online archive of Bay Area poets. During fall 2021/spring 2022, we are thrilled to be able to add 27 more writers reading one of their poems related to our new theme of “coexistence.”
In addition to ARC’s larger monthly readings (here), this series extends the number of voices we want to hear from, and carry with us, in these changing times, from emerging to established poets.
Andrea Abi-Karam is a trans, arab-american punk poet-performer cyborg. They are the author of EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019) and co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2020). Their second book, Villainy (Nightboat Books) reimagines militant collectivity in the wake of the Ghost Ship Fire and the Muslim Ban. They are currently working on a poet’s novel about crushes.
Leticia Hernández-Linares is an interdisciplinary, bilingual writer, artist, & racial justice educator. She is the author of Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl & Alejandria Fights Back! ¡La lucha de Alejandria! Widely published, she is the co-editor of The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States, and an inaugural YBCA10 fellow. She has lived, created, & protested in the Mission District for over two decades.A five-time San Francisco Arts Commission grantee, she teaches in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University.
Dr. Alan Pelaez Lopez is an Afro-Indigenous poet; an installation and adornment artist from Oaxaca, México; and a 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. Pelaez Lopez’s debut visual poetry collection, Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020), was a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award. They are the author of the chapbook to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020). Pelaez Lopez has been organizing with undocumented migrants in the United States for more than ten years.
Natalia M. Vigil is a queer Xicana writer with native heritage, multimedia curator, and big sister of six, born and raised in San Francisco. She is the co-founder of Still Here San Francisco for which she was honored as a Local Hero by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. She is an arts administrator passionate about community-driven creativity and cultural preservation through artist sustainability.
Kaylan Black, 2021/22 Oakland Vice Youth Poet Laureate and a member of the National Society of High School Scholars, is 17 years old and a Senior at Oakland Charter High School. She has been on the African American Honor Roll and Achievement, Honor Roll, and a Junior Community Organizer with ACCE. Poetry is unique to her because it allows her to freely express herself and it shows how different we are, and is a way to build bonds with others. In poems, she can release her feelings.
Rina Huang is still a half-child, teetering on the brink of adulthood. She is co-editor of The Steele in which she also publishes frequently. A soon-to-be graduate of the College Preparatory School in Oakland, as well as a soon-to-be-freshman at Amherst College, she finds herself at the constant cruz of exploration, of newness. She is an alumnus of the Iowa Young Writers Studio, the Kenyon Young Writers Workshop, and the California State Summer School for the Arts, and is a 2022 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate Finalist.
Adam Mansbach is the author of the New York Times bestseller Go the Fuck to Sleep, as well as Rage is Back, The End of the Jews (winner of the CA Book Award), and Angry Black White Boy, and the memoir-in-verse I Had a Brother Once. His debut screenplay for the Netflix Original BARRY was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and an NAACP Image Award. Mansbach’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Esquire, The Believer, The Guardian, and This American Life among others.His next novel, The Golem of Brooklyn, will be published by One World in September.
Gloria Frym is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, short fiction, and essays. Her most recent book is How Proust Ruined My Life & Other Essays. The True Patriot, a collection of proses, was published by Spuyten Duyvil. She has written two short story collections–Distance No Object (City Lights Books), and How I Learned (Coffee House Press). She is professor of writing and literature at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She lives in Berkeley.
Việt Lê is an artist, writer, academic, and curator whose work centers on spiritualities, trauma, representation, and sexualities with a focus on Southeast Asia and its diasporas. Dr. Lê is the author of Return Engagements: Contemporary Art’s Traumas of Modernity and History in Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh, and White Gaze. Lê is a Headlands Bay Area Arts Fellow and a 2022 Stanford CCSRE Mellon Arts Practitioner Fellow. Lê is an Associate Professor at the California College of the Arts and a board member Art Matters and Art Journal. vietle.net
Ayodele Nzinga, MFA, PhD is a multi-disciplined artist, community advocate, arts educator, and cultural architect invested in designing structures that support cultural production. She is an author, producer, and the inaugural Poet Laureate of Oakland working at the intersections of community well-being, cultural sovereignty, transformation, and change Nzinga is the director of the Lower Bottom Playaz, as well as the director of the Black Arts Movement Business District, Community Development Corporation of Oakland, and producer of BAMBDFEST International.
Yona Harvey is the author of You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love (Four Way Books), winner of The Believer Book Award in Poetry, and Hemming the Water, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is a Distinguished Visiting Professor in Poetry at Saint Mary’s College of California and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. She co-wrote with Roxane Gay Marvel’s World of Wakanda and co-wrote with Ta-Nehisi Coates Black Panther & the Crew.
Muriel Leung is from Queens, NY, Muriel Leung is the author of the Poetry Society of America’s 2022 Four Quartets Prize winning Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books) as well as Bone Confetti (Noemi Press) and Images Seen to Images Felt (Antenna) in collaboration with artist Kristine Thompson. She is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, VONA/Voices Workshop and the Community of Writers. She received her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from University of Southern California where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Humanities in a Digital World fellow.
Tony Robles was born in San Francisco and is the author of two collections of poetry and short stories: Cool Don’t Live Here No More–A letter to San Francisco (Ithuriel's Spear) and Fingerprints of a Hunger Strike (Ithuriel's Spear). His children’s book, Lakas and the Manilatown Fish just celebrated its 20th year of publication by Lee and Low. He was named the Carl Sandburg Writer in Residence by the Carl Sandburg Historic Home in Flat Rock, North Carolina in 2020 and earned his MFA in creative writing in 2023 from Vermont College of Fine Arts.