Full-program video: MK Chavez and Heather June Gibbons: September 20th, 2018
Video highlight clips: MK Chavez reads from Mothermorphosis | Heather June Gibbons reads "Smell the Moxy" from Her Mouth As Souvenir
A reading by Bay Area poets MK Chavez and Heather June Gibbons — helping to debut the first full-length book, Her Mouth As Souvenir, by SF State Creative Writing faculty member Gibbons. This event supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Free and open to the public.
Oakland based Latinx writer MK Chavez is the author of Mothermorphosis and Dear Animal (both from Nomadic Press.) She is a recipient of a 2017 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award and her poem The New Whitehouse, Finding Myself Among the Ruins was selected by Eileen Myles for the Cosmonauts Avenue 2017 Poetry Award. She is a co-founder/curator of the reading series Lyrics & Dirges and co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival, a fellow with CantoMundo, and guest curator of the reading series at UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in the Fall of 2018.
Heather June Gibbons is the author of the poetry collection Her Mouth as Souvenir, winner of the 2017 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize from the University of Utah Press, as well as two chapbooks, Sore Songs and Flyover. Her poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including Blackbird, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, jubilat, New American Writing, and West Branch. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has been the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Vermont Studio Center, Academy of American Poets and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She lives in San Francisco, where she teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University and in the community.