Flash Reading Series

Spring 2021 Flash Readings:

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.

Kim Addonizio

Kim Addonizio is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose. Her most recent poetry collection is Now We’re Getting Somewhere (W.W. Norton). Her memoir-in-essays, Bukowski in a Sundress, was published by Penguin. She has received NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and the essay, and her poetry has been widely translated and anthologized. Tell Me was a National Book Award Finalist in poetry. She lives in Oakland, CA. https://www.kimaddonizio.com
Image credit: Johnna Crawford

Reading available here.

Katherine Agyemaa Agard

Katherine Agyemaa Agard is a Trinidadian writer currently based in San Francisco. Her first book, of colour, was longlisted for the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize in Caribbean LIterature and won the 2018 Essay Press Open Book award.

Reading available here.

Bahaar Ahsan

Bahaar Ahsan is a poet in the Bay Area. Her first chapbook, Gay Girl Hyacinth, is forthcoming from Eyelet.

Reading available here.

Ari Banias

Ari Banias is the author of the forthcoming A Symmetry (W. W. Norton, 2021), and Anybody (2016). His recent poems appear in bæst, The Nation, The Rumpus, and in We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020). He lives in Oakland. Banias’ poem “Practice” first appeared in Kenyon Review.
Image by Chani Bockwinkel.

Reading available here.

Dodie Bellamy

Dodie Bellamy is a novelist, poet, and essayist. Dodie specializes in genre-bending work that focuses on feminism, sexuality, cultural artifacts both high and low, and all things queer. She is the author of Pink Steam (2004), Academonia (2006), When the Sick Rule the World (2015), and more. In October, 2021, Semiotext(e) published her new collection of essays, Bee Reaved, as well as a new edition of her 1998 PoMo vampire novel, The Letters of Mina Harker. With Kevin Killian she edited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997, the first major anthology of New Narrative writing. She currently teaches at California College of the Arts in Undergrad Writing & Literature, and Grad Fine Arts. 

Reading available here.

William Brewer

William Brewer’s debut novel, The Red Arrow, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2022.  I Know Your Kind, his book of poems, was a winner of the National Poetry Series. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Sewanee Review, and The Best American Poetry. Formerly a Stegner Fellow, he is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. He lives in Oakland.

Reading available here.

MK Chavez

MK Chavez is a Black Latinx writer and educator. She is the author of Dear Animal and several chapbooks. Chavez curates the reading series Lyrics & Dirges, is co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival, and poetry editor at Bronzeville Quarterly. She is a recipient of the PEN Oakland Award and the 2021 San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press literary award. You can find her recent work at the Academy of Poets Poem-A-Day series and at Golden Gate Park among the trees with the Voice of Trees projects.

Reading available here.

Jennifer S. Cheng

Jennifer S. Cheng’s book MOON: LETTERS, MAPS, POEMS was selected by Bhanu Kapil for the Tarpaulin Sky Award and named a Publishers Weekly “Best Book of 2018.” She is also the author of HOUSE A, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Omnidawn Poetry Prize, and INVOCATION: AN ESSAY, an image-text chapbook. She is a 2019-20 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow and has received awards from Brown University, the University of Iowa, San Francisco State University, the U.S. Fulbright program, Kundiman, Bread Loaf, and the Academy of American Poets. www.jenniferscheng.com

Reading available here.

최 Lindsay | Lindsay Choi

최 Lindsay is a poet and translator working between English, Korean, and Swedish. They are the author of a book of poetry, Transverse (Futurepoem, 2021), and a chapbook, Matrices (speCt! books, 2017). They are a Kundiman fellow and a Ph.D. student in English literature at UC Berkeley. More of their work can be found in Omniverse, Amerarcana, and Aster(ix) Journal, and elsewhere. Recent projects include a creative manuscript in and out of translation on the colonial history of leprosy in Korea. They are a founding co-editor, with Noah Ross, of the chapbook press MO(O)ON/IO. Their work has been translated to French, and will appear in the forthcoming issue of NIOQUES, 22/23: Nouvelle Poésie Des États-Unis (New U.S. Poetry), edited by DoubleChange Collective, and translated by Abigail Lang. Visit them at lindsaychoi.com.

Reading available here.

Maxe Crandall

Maxe Crandall is a poet, playwright, and director. His performance novel about AIDS archives and intergenerational memory The Nancy Reagan Collection made the New York Public Library’s Best 10 Poetry Books of 2020, LitHub’s 65 Favorite Books of 2020, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry. He is the author of the chapbooks Emoji for Cher Heart and Together Men Make Paradigms, and is the founder of the theater company Beautiful Moments in Popular Culture. Maxe is Associate Director of the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stanford University. maxecrandall.com

Reading available here.

Sophia Dahlin

Sophia Dahlin is a poet in Oakland. She teaches generative poetry workshops, and co-edits the chapbook press Eyelet. Her first book, Natch, is out now from City Lights.
Image credit: Brooke Cena

Reading available here.

Eric Falci

Eric Falci is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.  He is the author of Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966-2010 (2012), the Cambridge Introduction to British Poetry, 1945-2010 (2015), and The Value of Poetry (2020), as well as a number of essays on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish and British poetry.  With Paige Reynolds, he is the co-editor of Irish Literature in Transition, 1980-2020 (2020).  His first book of poetry, Late Along the Edgelands, appeared in 2019 from Tuumba Press.

Reading available here.

Jennifer Foerster

Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of two books of poetry, Leaving Tulsa (2013) and Bright Raft in the Afterweather (2018), and served as the Associate Editor of the recently released When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. She is the recipient of a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. Jennifer currently teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop and is the Literary Assistant to the U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. Foerster grew up living internationally, is of European (German/Dutch) and Mvskoke descent, and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma. Image: Richard Blue Cloud Castaneda.

Reading available here.

C. S. Giscombe

C. S. Giscombe is a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a poet and essayist, and his recognitions include the Stephen Henderson Award, an American Book Award, the Carl Sandburg Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, and the Canadian Embassy. His recent books include Prairie Style, Ohio Railroads, and Border Towns. Similarly—collected poetry and new work—will appear in 2021 as will Train Music, a work in collaboration with the artist Judith Margolis.

Reading available here.

Caroline Goodwin

Caroline Goodwin’s forthcoming books are Matanuska (Aquifer Press, Wales, UK), Madrigals (Big Yes Press, San Luis Obispo, CA), and Old Snow, White Sun (JackLeg Press, Washington, D.C.). From 2014-2016 she served as the first Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, CA. Originally from Alaska, she is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford and currently lives on the San Mateo Coast with her two daughters and Jimi Hendrix the Pug. 

Reading available here.

Amanda Gunn

Amanda Gunn is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford as well as a doctoral candidate in English at Harvard where she works on Black poetics, Black pleasure, and ephemerality. Raised in Connecticut, she worked as a medical copyeditor for 13 years before earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Her work appears in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Lana Turner, and The Baffler. Her poem “Prayer” and Return” forthcoming in Narrative Magazine.

Reading available here.

Brenda Hillman

Brenda Hillman is the author of ten collections of poetry from Wesleyan University Press, including Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days (2018). She has edited and co-translated numerous books, most recently At Your Feet by Ana Cristina Cesar— co-translated with her mother, Helen Hillman. She currently serves as a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets, co-directs the Poetry Program of the Community of Writers and teaches at Saint Mary’s College of California.
blueflowerarts.com/artist/brenda-hillman/
Image credit: Robert Hass

Reading available here.

Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield’s ninth poetry collection, Ledger (Knopf, 2020), centers on the crises of biosphere and social justice. Other books include two now-classic books of essays, Nine Gates and Ten Windows. Hirshfield has been long-listed for the National Book Award, and received the Poetry Center and California Book Awards, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, and ten selections for The Best American Poetry. A former chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and founder of Poets For Science, Hirshfield is a 2019 elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Image credit: Curt Richter

Reading available here.

Ra Malika Imhotep

Ra Malika Imhotep is a Black feminist writer and performance artist from Atlanta, GA currently completing a PhD in African Diaspora Studies and New Media Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. As a scholar and cultural worker, Ra is invested in exploring relationships between queer Black femininities, Black vernacular cultures, and the performance of labor. As a steward of Black Studies and Black feminist thought, Ra dreams, organizes, and facilitates spaces of critical reflection and embodied spiritual-political education. Ra is co-author of The Black Feminist Study Theory Atlas and their debut poetry collection gossypiin is being published by Red Hen Press, April 2022 (out this week!). 

Reading available here!

Mason J.

Mason J. is a Black-Indigenous historian, visual & performing artist, educator, and cultural worker born, raised, and residing in Ramaytush-Ohlone territory/San Francisco, CA. They are coeditor of Still Here SF (Foglifter Press, 2019) and author of the poetry chapbook, Crossbones on My Life (Nomadic Press, 2021). In addition to receiving fellowships from VONA Voices and the SFPL James C. Hormel LGBTQ Center, and past with the world’s first Transgender Cultural District. Mason currently serves as interim Executive Director at RADAR Productions, and program manager of Show Us Your Spines, a bimonthly Queer & Trans Artists of Color Archives Residency.

Reading available here!

Fiza-Jihan

Fiza-Jihan’s creative work is devotional in nature, spiritually inclined and currently a reflection on grief, familial ties, migration, and friendship. Their processes inform each other and are integrated; they work with prose, videography, and sound to move through personal emotional realities and catalyze new somatic experiences for others.

Reading available here!

Leena Joshi

Leena Joshi is an artist, writer, and educator. Their recent written work can be found in SFMOMA’s Open Space, the Berkeley Poetry Review, and Monday: the Jacob Lawrence Gallery Journal, among others.

Reading available here.

Nathalie Khankan

Nathalie Khankan is the author of Quiet Orient Riot (Omnidawn), recipient of the 2021 California Book Award in Poetry. She was the founding director of The Danish House in Palestine and teaches Arabic language and literature in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley.

Acknowledgments: Guitar: Tarik “Excentrik” Kazaleh

Reading available here.

Ava Koohbor

Ava Koohbor is a poet, visual, and sound artist. Her poems have appeared in various publications as well the chapbooks Triangle Squared (Bootstrap Press) and Sinusoidal Forms (Lew Gallery) along with Death Under Construction (Ugly Duckling Presse/ Bird & Beckett Books). Her latest assemblages (Eye of Noir) hosted by Colter Jacobson were exhibited at Right Window Gallery. She believes that each artist is a medium to transfer the world of possibilities to what is.

Reading available here!

Dana Koster

Dana Koster has earned degrees from UC Berkeley and Cornell University. From 2011-2013, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Her first collection, Binary Stars, was published by Carolina Wren Press in 2017. Dana’s poems have appeared in EPOCH, Indiana Review, Muzzle Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, The Cincinnati Review and many others. She lives in Modesto, California with her husband and two children, where she works as a wedding photographer. For the past six years, Dana has also worked as one half of the art project Broad Sides with her collaborator, painter Chelsea America.

Reading available here.

Raina J. León

Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia.  She is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, and sombra: dis(locate) and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. Her next book, black god mother this body, will be released with Black Freighter Press.  She also is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She educates our present and future agitators/educators as a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, only the third Black person (all Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve that rank there. Image credit: Matteo Monchiero 

Reading available here.

Angie Sijun Lou

Angie Sijun Lou is a Kundiman Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Best Small Fictions, The Asian American Literary Review, and others. She is a Fiction Editor at FENCE, a Ph.D. Candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an instructor at San Quentin State Prison. 

Reading available here.

tanea lunsford lynx

tanea lunsford lynx is a fourth-generation Black San Franciscan on both sides. tanea is a writer, educator, and cultural worker. She leads the Spoken Arts Department at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts and teaches Social justice and Ethnic Studies classes at City College of San Francisco. She is at work on her second book, a work of creative nonfiction. You can find her work online at tanealunsfordlynx.com.

Reading available here.

Randall Mann

Randall Mann is the author of five poetry collections, most recently A Better Life, which was published by Persea Books in April. His poems have appeared in the Adroit Journal, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. He lives in San Francisco.

Reading available here.

Thea Matthews

Thea Matthews is born and raised in San Francisco, California. She is a poet, author, and educator. She attained her BA in Sociology at UC Berkeley, where she studied and taught June Jordan’s program Poetry for the People led by Aya de Leon. Her debut poetry collection Unearth [The Flowers] was published June 2020 by Red Light Lit Press and is listed as part of the Best Indie Poetry of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews. She has work in The New Republic, Atlanta Review, The Rumpus, and others. Currently, Thea Matthews is a MFA Poetry candidate at New York University. 

Reading available here.

Florencia Milito

Florencia Milito is a bilingual poet, writer, and translator whose work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Indiana Review, Catamaran, Diálogo, 92nd Street Y, Quiet Lightning, Ninth Letter, Latinas: Struggles & Protests in 21st Century USA, Zócalo Public Square, womenvoicesforchange.org, and GUEST, among others. A Hedgebrook and Community of Writers alumna, and CantoMundo fellow, her writing has been influenced by her early experience fleeing Argentina’s 1976 coup, subsequent childhood in Venezuela, and immigration to the United States at the age of nine. Her bilingual collection Ituzaingó: Exiles and Reveries / exilios y ensueños was published in 2021 by Nomadic Press.

Reading available here.

Zouhair Mussa

Zouhair Mussa is a Sudanese/Nubian-American community organizer and multi-disciplinary artist from West Oakland. His art is based on the life he has lived and aims at addressing that which is detrimental to him and his community. He seeks to shed light on injustices that plague the places he calls home. He uses his art to remember the fallen and dreams of healing the struggle. Most importantly, he wants to uplift and inspire change with the aid of his artistic expression.

Reading available here.

Geoffrey G. O’Brien

Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s latest book is Experience in Groups (Wave, 2018). He is also the author most recently of People on Sunday (Wave, 2013) and the coauthor (with John Ashbery and Timothy Donnelly) of Three Poets (Minus A Press, 2012). O’Brien is a Professor of English at UC Berkeley and also teaches for Mount Tamalpais College (formerly the Prison University Project) at San Quentin State Prison.

Reading available here.

Lucie Pereira

Lucie Pereira (she/her) is a multiracial writer and educator. Her work has appeared in Honey Literary, The Hellebore, Yes Poetry, Jarnal, and Zone 3, among others. She lives in San Francisco, where she teaches creative writing for youth at 826 Valencia and Children’s After School Arts.  

Reading available here.

Brittany Perham

Brittany Perham is the author of Double Portrait (W.W. Norton, 2017), which received the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was nominated for a Northern California Book Award; The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions, 2012); and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative chapbook The Night Could Go in Either Direction (SHP, 2016). She is a Jones Lecturer in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. She lives in San Francisco. Image credit: Marco Giugliarelli for Civitella Ranieri Foundation

Reading available here.

Katie Peterson

Katie Peterson is the author of five books of poetry, including the 2021 collection Life in a Field published by Omnidawn Press. Her 2019 collection A Piece of Good News was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award. Her work has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is Professor of English at the UC Davis where she directs the Creative Writing Program and is a Chancellor’s Fellow. She is a Trustee of Deep Springs College, an experimental school in rural California whose mission is to train young people for lives of service.  

Reading available here.

D.A. Powell

D. A. Powell’s books include Repast (Graywolf, 2014) and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf, 2012). His honors include two Northern California Book Awards, the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the 2019 John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He teaches at University of San Francisco. Photo by Ben Decastro (taken at Ferlinghetti’s 100th birthday party).

Reading available here.

Barbara Jane Reyes

Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Letters to a Young Brown Girl (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2020). She was born in Manila, Philippines, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is also the author Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003), Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010), which received the Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry, To Love as Aswang (Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc., 2015), and Invocation to Daughters (City Lights Publishers, 2017).
Her seventh book, Wanna Peek Into My Notebook?: Notes on Pinay Liminality, is forthcoming from Paloma Press in 2022.
Image by Peter Dressel.

Reading available here.

Rachel Richardson

Rachel Richardson is the author of two books of poems, Copperhead (2011) and Hundred-Year Wave (2016), and her poems have appeared in the New York Times, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. A former Wallace Stegner and NEA Fellow, she co-directs the community literary arts center Left Margin LIT and serves as Poetry Advisor to the Bay Area Book Festival. She lives in Berkeley. 

Reading available here.

Atsuro Riley

Atsuro Riley is the author of Heard-Hoard (University of Chicago Press, 2021), winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Romey’s Order (University of Chicago Press, 2010), winner of the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, The Believer Poetry Award, and the Witter Bynner Award from the Library of Congress. His work has been honored with the Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, and the Wood Prize given by POETRY magazine.  Brought up in the South Carolina lowcountry, Riley lives in San Francisco. atsuroriley.org

Reading available here.

Janice Lobo Sapigao

Janice Lobo Sapigao (she/her) is a daughter of immigrants from the Philippines. She is the author of two books of poetry: microchips for millions (Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc., 2016), and like a solid to a shadow (Nightboat Books). She was named one of the SF Bay Area’s Women to Watch in 2017 by KQED Arts. She was a VONA/Voices Fellow and was awarded a Manuel G. Flores Prize, PAWA Scholarship to the Kundiman Poetry Retreat. She is an Associate Professor of English at Skyline College, 2020-2021 Santa Clara County Poet Laureate Emeritus, and was a Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets.

Reading available here.

sam sax

sam sax is a queer, jewish, writer & educator. The author of Madness winner of The National Poetry Series and Bury It winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. They’re the two time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, & Granta and elsewhere. They’ve received fellowships from The Poetry Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, Stanford University, and currently lives in Oakland and dreams about having a dog.

Reading available here.

Kim Shuck

Kim Shuck was the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco. Shuck is solo author of seven books of prose and poetry. Her latest, a chapbook, is Whose Water? from Mammoth Publications, and the most recent full length book is Deer Trails from The City Lights Foundation. Shuck has won awards in the US and in the UK, the latest is a Groundbreaker award from the Northern California Book Reviewers.
Image credit: Douglas A. Salin.

Reading available here.

Kevin Simmonds

Kevin Simmonds is a San Francisco-based writer and musician originally from New Orleans. His poetry collections include Bend to it and Mad for Meat (both from Salmon Poetry). He edited Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality (Sibling Rivalry Press) and Ota Benga Under My Mother’s Roof (University of South Carolina), the posthumously published collection by Carrie Allen McCray. His latest work is The Monster I am Today: Leontyne Price and a Life in Verse (Northwestern University), a hybrid collection of poetry and prose.

Reading available here.

Darius Simpson

Darius Simpson is a writer, educator, performer, and skilled living room dancer from Akron, Ohio. Much like the means of production, he believes poetry belongs to and with the masses. He aims to inspire those chills that make you frown and slightly twist up ya face in approval. Darius believes in the dissolution of empire and the total liberation of Africans and all oppressed people by any means available. Free The People. Free The Land. Free All Political Prisoners. 

Reading available here.

Maya Sisneros

Maya Sisneros is a Bay Area-based writer whose poetry and fiction explore identity, intimacy, and lines of f/light. She is a recipient of the inaugural 2021 SFF/Nomadic Press Lit Award and AWP’s 2021 Kurt Brown Prize for Fiction. She attended a Tin House Summer Workshop in 2021, and is currently an organizer of BIPOC Writing Party, a weekly generative writing space for people of color.

Reading available here.

Juliana Spahr

Juliana Spahr was born in Chillicothe, Ohio. She is a poet and scholar and earned a BA in languages and literature from Bard College and a PhD in English from SUNY Buffalo. Her interests revolve around questions of transformation, language, and ecology. Concerned with politics without being overtly political, Spahr’s work crosses a variety of American landscapes, from the disappearing beaches of Hawaiʻi to the small town of her Appalachian childhood. Her books of criticism and theory include Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment (2018) and Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (2001).

Reading available here.

Aimee Suzara

Aimee Suzara is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, and performer whose mission is to create poetic and theatrical work about race, gender, and the body to provoke dialogue and social change. Her debut poetry book, SOUVENIR (WordTech Editions 2014), a Willa Award Finalist, was lauded as “a powerful meditation on history and the legacies of race, family and identity” (David Mura), and her poems appear in numerous collections, including Phat’itude and Kartika Review. Her performance work has been supported by YBCAway Award, National Endowment for the Arts; selected for the One Minute Play Festival, APAture, and the Utah Arts Festival; and staged at the Berkeley Repertory Theater, CounterPULSE, and others. http://www.aimeesuzara.net.

Reading available here.

Lehua M. Taitano

Lehua M. Taitano, familian Kuetu yan Kabesa, is a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam) and co-founder of Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century. She is the author of two volumes of poetry—Inside Me an Island and A Bell Made of Stones. Art 25: Art in the Twenty-Fifth Century is a dynamic collective comprised of artists Lisa Jarrett (Portland, OR) Lehua M. Taitano (Santa Rosa, CA), and Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng (Honolulu, HI). It is the culmination of years (and ancestral lifetimes) of shared curiosity, vision, and an outright insistence to see their cultures thrive within contemporary art.

Reading available here.

D’mani Thomas

D’mani Thomas is a queer, Black visual theorist, horror enthusiast, and writer from Oakland, California (Ohlone territory). D’mani has received fellowships from The Watering Hole, Foglifter Literary Journal, and Afro Urban Society. His work has been published by The Auburn Avenue, The Ana, MARY: A Journal of New Writing and his poem, “Survival Tactics” was recently shortlisted for the 2020 Penrose Poetry Prize. His current work obsesses over what it means to create intimacy under total surveillance.

Reading available here.

Nellie Wong

Nellie Wong was born in Oakland. She is a socialist feminist activist and has authored several poetry books. Breakfast Lunch Dinner was released in 2012.  She was co-featured in the documentary “Mitsuye and Nellie Asian American Poets,” and has two poems installed at public sites in San Francisco. She performs as part of The Last Hoisan Poets with Genny Lim and Flo Oy Wong.  She dreams in jazz, bards in Hoisan-wa, and cooks for working-class solidarity.

Reading available here.