Thursday, December 1 - 7:00 pm PS to 9:00 pm PST
The Poetry Center, HUM 512, San Francisco State University
Full program: Barbara Jane Reyes and Oscar Bermeo reading and in conversation
Video clips: Oscar Bermeo reads "Ode to Government Cheese" | Barbara Jane Reyes reads from an unpublished work dedicated to her father
Video clips: Oscar Bermeo reads "Ode to Government Cheese" | Barbara Jane Reyes reads from an unpublished work dedicated to her father
A reading and conversation, the final event in the Kuwentuhan (Talkstory) project of The Poetry Center and Barbara Jane Reyes, supported by an award from the Creative Work Fund. Throughout 2016, we collaborated on a number of public events, featuring a group of six poets in residence during April 2016. This reading and conversation by Reyes and Oscar Bermeo concludes the public programs in our project, and will feature a debut screening of a short experimental video documenting the April 23, 2016 Kuwentuhan (Talkstory) Collective Performance, produced by The Documentary Film Institute, SFSU. This event is free and open to the public.
Kuwentuhan (Talkstory) takes the Tagalog term, a phoneticized form adapted through the colonial Spanish, as its title, proposition, and starting point. Kuwentuhan (“necessary step toward big talk,” by one definition) is orally based, informal in nature, usually spontaneous, and is always an opportunity for people to converge and share. It occurs in all kinds of social spaces as talkstory circle.
Born in Ecuador and raised in the Bronx, Oscar Bermeo is the author of four poetry chapbooks, most recently, To the Break of Dawn. He has taught creative writing workshops to inmates in Rikers Island Penitentiary, at-risk youth in the Bronx, foster teens in San Jose, bilingual elementary students in Oakland, and to adults through the Oakland Public Library's Oakland Word program. He is a Bronx Recognizes Its Own, CantoMundo, San Francisco Intergenerational Writers Lab, and VONA: Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation poetry fellow. Oscar makes his home in Oakland, with his wife, poeta Barbara Jane Reyes. More.
Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of To Love as Aswang (Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc., 2015). She was born in Manila, Philippines, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is the author of three previous collections of poetry, 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, and Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010), which received the Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry. She is also the author of the chapbooks Easter Sunday (Ypolita Press, 2008), Cherry (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2008), and For the City that Nearly Broke Me (Aztlán Libre Press, 2012).
An Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow, she received her B.A. in Ethnic Studies at U.C. Berkeley and her M.F.A. at San Francisco State University. She is an adjunct professor at University of San Francisco’s Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program. She has also taught in the Asian American Studies Department at San Francisco State University, and in Creative Writing and English at Mills College. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for Philippine American Writers and Artists (PAWA). She lives with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland, where she is co-editor of Doveglion Press. More.
Event contact:
The Poetry Center
Event email:
poetry@sfsu.edu
Event phone:
415-338-2227
Event sponsor:
The Poetry Center and The Creative Work Fund