Welcome to The Poetry Center

City Lights and The Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State College present

Rae Armantrout with Elizabeth Robinson

Rae Armantrout celebrates the publication of

Safe Rooms

published by Wesleyan University Press

Online and In-Store

Acclaimed author Rae Armantrout’s remarkable new collection Safe Rooms, explores the undercurrents of modern life with an unflinching eye on human nature, social malaise, and the unsettling ways in which we attempt to protect ourselves from a world that continually undermines our sense of safety. As the title poem says: “your thoughts /roar and echo//around you—originating/god knows where.// You try to plug your ears/but you are an ear/ that can’t stop listening.” Through poems that examine our darker impulses—our tendencies to self-destruct, to grapple with envy, and to navigate the intricate web of family dynamics—Armantrout captures the complex, often contradictory ways in which we search for meaning and connection. Her work holds a mirror to the forces shaping us, both intimate and vast, showing that the so-called “safe rooms” we construct are fragile, temporary shelters, not havens from the chaos that surrounds us.

Rae Armantrout is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Professor Emerita of Writing at UC San Diego. Her collection Versed won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was also a finalist for the National Book Award. Rae Armantrout’s poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, Poetry, The New Yorker, New American Writing, Lana Turner, Granta, several editions of Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She is professor emerita at UC San Diego and currently lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of 20 books, including Rendered Paradise (with Susanne Dyckman), Thirst & Surfeit, and Excursive. Her poetry has earned the National Poetry Series for Pure Descent and the Fence Modern Poets Prize for Apprehend, among other recognitions. Robinson has taught at the University of San Francisco, Naropa University, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is currently a senior pastor at Orinda Community Church in the Bay Area and teaches at Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop.

Zhang Er and Leonard Schwartz at the SFSU Poetry Center September 24th. 

Zhang Er (Chinese: 张耳, born 1960) is the pen name of Chinese and American poet, translator, and opera librettist Mingxia Li (李明霞). Born in Beijing, China, where she trained as a physician, she has lived in the United States since 1986.^[1] She earned a Ph.D. in Molecular Pharmacology in 1992 from the Graduate School of Medical Sciences of Cornell University (now the Weill Cornell Graduate School), while simultaneously immersing herself in the New York poetry scene, where she wrote poetry, hosted bilingual readings, and edited literary journals.^[2] She now teaches at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and continues to write poetry.^[

Leonard Schwartz earned his BA in creative writing and literature from Bard College and his MA in philosophy from Columbia University. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Heavy Sublimation (Talisman House, 2018); Salamander: A Bestiary (Chax Press, 2017), with painter Simon Carr; If (Talisman House, 2012); The Library of Seven Readings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008); and Gnostic Blessing (Goats & Compasses, 1992).

Schwartz is also the author of the multi-genre books of poetics The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises (University of Arkansas Press, 2016), Language as Responsibility (Tinfish Editions, 2006), and A Flicker at the Edge of Things: Essays Towards a Poetics (Spuyten Duyvil, 1998). He edited and cotranslated Benjamin Fondane's Cine-Poems and Others (NYRB Poets, 2016), and hosts the radio program Cross Cultural Poetics, archived online at the University of Pennsylvania’s PennSound.

Schwartz teaches at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and divides his time between there and New York City.

As part of the 2026 Undiscipling the Fields series, It is an honor and a pleasure to welcome MAZZA Writer-In-Residence Tyehimba Jess for a poetry reading and conversation in the Poetry Center. Join us on Tuesday April 7, 2026 from  5pm to 7pm in the Poetry Center, HUM 512. 

Tyehimba Jess has written two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Jess' fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals, he is a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim fellowship in 2018.

Join the LiveStream here. 

On Wednesday, April 8, 6:00pm to 8:00pm, in a collaboration with the Poetry Center and the Undisciplining the Fields series at the San Francisco State University Department of Creative Writing; Small Press Traffic; and Black [Space] Residency @ Minnesota Street Project present a special engagement with Tyehimba Jess, recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and Tongo Eisen-Martin, the 2021-2024 San Francisco Poet Laureate. Please join us for a necessary and restorative evening of poetry by poets whose works are vibrantly alive to the world as is and who invite us to imagine possible worlds that might could be–necessary worlds of otherwise and other ways. 

If you can't make the event, join the Live Stream here. 

This event is free and open to the public.

Books by both authors will be sold on a sliding scale.

6-6:30pm - Reception

6:30-8pm - Readings and Q&A

Zhang Er and Leonard Schwartz reading their poetry and in conversation at the SFSU Poetry Center on September 24th at 12:30. 
1600 Holloway, San Francisco in the Humanities Building Room 512.

Live stream link forthcoming. 

This event is free and open to the public.

Poet, editor, and translator Marcella Durand will give a reading and be in conversation at the Poetry Center. 5:30pm to 7pm. Marcella Durand's newest collection of poetry, The Temple of Happiness, is forthcoming from Black Square Editions in August 2026. Her book, A Winter Triangle, was selected by Srikanth Reddy for the 2024 Poetic Justice Institute Prize and published by Fordham University Press in 2025. She is the co-editor with Jennifer Firestone of Other Influences: The Untold History of Avant-Garde Feminist Poetry (MIT Press, 2024). 

Live stream link forthcoming. 

This event is free and open to the public.

On Friday, April 24th 6:00pm to 7:30pm at Tamarack in Oakland in collaboration with the Poetry Center and the Undisciplining the Fields series at the San Francisco State University Department of Creative Writing present an exciting evening of poetry. Join us to celebrate Poetry Month with Marcella Durand, Aja Couchois-Duncan, Jie Liu, and Robin Tremblay-McGaw.  

This event is free and open to the public.

Tamarack 

1501 Harrison Street 

Oakland, Ca

*Live stream link to come. 

A rare midsummer event for The Poetry Center, joining forces with San Francisco International Flor y Canto Literary Festival and our friends at Medicine for Nightmares, to co-present three poets flying in from Mexico to take part in the annual festival. Minerva Reynosa, Indira Isel Torres Crux, and Aziz Córdova will be featured guests on Saturday evening, with Josiah Luis Alderete as host and emcee. Further festival events by the poets at the link below. Supported by Paseo Artístico and the Poetry Coalition.

The Poetry Center, as part of the Undisciplining the Fields series, in collaboration with City Lights Books co-presents Alexis Pauline Gumbs in conversation with Tonya M. Foster. This virtual event hosted by City Lights online takes place Wednesday November 6, 7:00 pm PST, to celebrate the publication of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). More information and free registration here. 

The Poetry Center in collaboration with City Lights Books co-presents a Tribute to the Life and Work of Tyrone Williams (1954–2024). Organized by Jeanne Heuving and erica lewis, this in-person Bay Area tribute to our friend and fellow poet takes place Tuesday November 19, 7:00 pm, at City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, in North Beach. This event will be livestreamed; register here. More on Tyrone Williams, posted at The Poetry Project, here.