Video highlight clips: Nellie Wong reads "Sounds in the Night" | Genny Lim reads "Soldier of Fortune, for Black Lives Shattered by Police Violence"
Full program video: Nellie Wong and Genny Lim: August 31, 2017
San Francisco poet-activists Genny Lim and Nellie Wong (in her first featured reading for The Poetry Center), reading and conversation. This event was free and open to the public.
Genny Lim is the current San Francisco Jazz Poet Laureate. She has performed in poetry & music collaborations with the late jazz legends Max Roach, Herbie Lewis, and Fred Ho, and with local musicians John Santos, Francis Wong, and Jon Jang. She has also been featured at World Poetry Festivals in Venezuela, Bosnia, and Italy. Her award-winning play Paper Angels aired on PBS American Playhouse in 1985 and was reprised in 2010 in San Francisco Chinatown’s Portsmouth Square, receiving the San Francisco Fringe Festival Best Site Specific Award. It was remounted in 2016 at the Seattle Fringe Festival and will be produced in St. Louis, Missouri this year. Lim’s performance piece with drummer Marshall Trammell, Don’t Shoot! A Requiem in Black, dedicated to Black Lives Matter, premiered at Safe House this last April to sold-out houses and will be performed at next year’s SF Jazz Poetry Festival at SF Jazz Center. Lim is author of four poetry collections: Winter Place, Child of War, Paper Gods and Rebels, and KRA!, and she is co-author of the seminal Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island.
Nellie Wong is the author of four books of poetry: Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park, The Death of Long Steam Lady, Stolen Moments, and Breakfast Lunch Dinner (Meridien PressWorks, 2012). She most recently edited Talking Back: Voices of Color (Red Letter Press, 2015), a collection of essays and interviews advancing the views of a multi-racial, inter-generational mix of 30 Black, Latina/o, Indigenous, Asian Pacific American, Palestinian, and LGBTQ community organizers. The first-born daughter of Chinese immigrants in Oakland, California, she’s active with Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party and has worked as a secretary and administrative assistant and Affirmative Action analyst. She was a delegate to the San Francisco Labor Council for University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE). She’s taught at Mills College and the University of Minnesota. Wong has traveled with Alice Walker, Tillie Olsen, Paule Marshall, and other delegates on the First U. S. Women Writers Tour to China, and has read throughout the U.S., and in Australia, and Cuba. Her work has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, French and Italian. She’s co-featured with Mitsuye Yamada in the documentary film, Mitsuye and Nellie: Asian American Poets, by Allie Light and Irving Saraf.