#queerwriters

• This program also available via live-stream and at the same link after the event.
   
• Masks are required for those attending in person.

Co-presented by The Poetry Center and The Green Arcade, with thanks to our generous host, McRoskey Mattress Co. 

Our friends and fellow poets Aaron Shurin and Robert Glück each turn 75 this year, and we're putting on a little celebratory reading and evening in their honor. Both are also alums of The Poetry Center, and have been teachers and mentors to dozens of younger poets and writers across the years. Please join us to celebrate their collective anniversary. 

Aaron Shurin is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, most recently The Blue Absolute (Nightboat, 2020), Flowers & Sky: Two Talks (Entre Rios Books, 2017), and The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks (University of Michigan Press, 2015). A pioneer in both LGBTQ studies and innovative verse, Shurin was a member of the original Good Gay Poets collective in Boston, and later the first graduate of the storied Poetics Program at New College of California. He has written numerous critical essays about poetic theory and compositional practice, as well as personal narratives on sexual identity, gender fluidity, and the AIDS epidemic. He is the former Associate Director of the Poetry Center at SFSU. A longtime educator, he’s the former director and currently Professor Emeritus for the MFA Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.

Robert Glück’s poetry collections include Reader; La Fontaine, a collaboration with Bruce Boone; In Commemoration of the Visit, a collaboration with Kathleen Fraser; and Parables, a collaboration with the Cuban artist, José Angel Toirac. Roof Books will publish Glück’s long poem, I, Boombox, in 2023. His fiction includes the story collections Denny Smith and Elements, and the novels Jack the Modernist and Margery Kempe, which was republished in 2020 by NYRB Classics. An excerpt from his latest novel, About Ed, appeared this summer in The Paris Review. Glück edited, with Camille Roy, Mary Berger, and Gail Scott, the anthology Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative, and his collected essays, Communal Nude, was published by Semiotext(e) in 2016. Glück served as director of San Francisco State’s The Poetry Center, co-director of Small Press Traffic Literary Center, and associate editor at Lapis Press. He lives in San Francisco. 

• This program also available via live-stream and at the same link after the event.

Presented by The Poetry Center in conjunction with the Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series

RSVP TO ATTEND IN PERSON

Please join us for The Poetry Center's memorial tribute to our beloved friend and teacher, Etel Adnan. We'll gather in person, with six guest artists, poets and writers, both those who knew Etel personally and others influenced by her life and work. Audience can attend either in person (limited to 50, RSVP required) or watch via live-stream. Featured participants: Zaina Alsous, David Buuck, Naz Cuguoğlu, Fady Joudah, Stefania Pandolfo, and Camille Roy. Presented in conjunction with the Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series.

• Please note: proof of vaccination and mask are required in order to attend in person.

Etel Adnan (1925–2021) was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon. Her mother was a Greek from Smyrna, her father a high ranking Ottoman officer born in Damascus. In Lebanon, she was educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, in Paris, following World War II. In January 1955 she went to the United States to pursue post-graduate studies in philosophy at U.C. Berkeley, and Harvard. From 1958 to 1972, she taught philosophy at Dominican College of San Rafael, California. 

In 1972, she moved back to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers—first for Al Safa, then for L’Orient le Jour. She stayed in Lebanon until 1976. In 1977, her novel Sitt Marie-Rose was published in Paris, and won the France-Pays Arabes award. This novel has been translated into more than 10 languages, and was to have an immense influence, becoming a classic of war literature. 

In 1977, Adnan, together with her life-partner, Simone Fattal, artist and publisher of The Post-Apollo Press, re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, with frequent stays in Paris.

Some twenty books of her poetry, fiction, and essays were published during Adnan's lifetime, garnering multiple awards, including the Griffin International Poetry Prize, 2020, for Time (shared with translator Sarah Riggs). In 2014, To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader, in two large volumes edited by Brandon Shimoda and Thom Donovan, was published by Nightboat Books. That year, she was awarded the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, France’s highest cultural honor.

In the later years of her life, Etel Adnan was embraced internationally by the art world, with numerous exhibitions of her paintings, work for textiles, prints, and unique hand-painted books, many interviews and features in international art media, and multiple catalogs and monographs devoted to her art. The exhibition "Etel Adnan: Light's New Measure" gathered her work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in winter 2021–22.
(Adapted, with additions, from the biography at eteladnan.com)

Photo: Etel Adnan by Norma Cole, 19 June 2011, at Irving Petlin exhibition, Éspace topographie de l'art, Paris.

Etel Adnan, interview with Lisa Robertson, BOMB, April 1, 2014

Etel Adnan at home, talking on painting and writing with Judith Benhamou-Huet

Etel Adnan, New York Times obituary, by Nana Asfour, Nov 14, 2021

Etel Adnan, ArtNews obituary, by Tessa Solomon, Nov 15, 2021

The Art World's Tainted Love for "Discovering" Artists: the Case of Etel Adnan, by Naz Cuguoğlu, Hyperallergic, March 6, 2022

The Mountain at the Center: Reflections on Etel Adnan, Small Press Traffic, Feb. 27, 2022

Tripwire: A Journal of Poetics

Co-presented with the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability

With Dawn-Elissa Fischer, moderator

• ASL and CART will be provided. For any other access concerns, please email Emily Beitiks at beitiks@sfsu.edu.

One of many events taking place beginning March 2022 in conjunction with the Poetry Coalition, under the collective heading “The future lives in our bodies*: Poetry & Disability Justice,” with thanks to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Ford Foundation for support of Poetry Coalition programming. Dr. Dawn-Elissa Fischer, who writes and consults about popular culture, policy and political activism with a focus on antiracism, social media and education in a global context, will kindly join the program as moderator (more here). 

Krip-Hop Nation is a worldwide association of artists with disabilities. Founded in 2007 by Leroy F. Moore Jr. in Berkeley, California, the Movement campaigns for equality for people with disabilities worldwide with concerts, tours, workshops and much more. In 2020, four Krip-Hop Nation artists received Emmy Award accolades for Outstanding Music Direction on the Paralympic documentary film Rising Phoenix. 

In addition to Leroy F. Moore Jr. and co-founder Keith Jones, this event presents three other outstanding artists affiliated with Krip-Hop Nation — Toni Hickman, DJ Quad, and Wheelchair Sports Camp — joining in performance and conversation. 

• "It is important to us to be seen as artists and musicians who do their thing seriously, purposefully and professionally. We want to show, that a person with a disability also has the right to equal opportunities, that nobody has to hide, that a person with a disability can also discover their talents, promote them and live them out and thus be a valuable part of society. According to our understanding of inclusion, this is exactly what this means: that the focus is on people with their skills and abilities, not their disabilities. We do not want pity, we want consideration, equality, respect and recognition to the same extent that every physically and mentally healthy person enjoys them."
  —from the Krip-Hop Nation website

Bios

Leroy F. Moore Jr., 2021 Emmy award winner, is founder of Krip-Hop Nation and a newly-announced United States Artists 2022 Fellow. Since the 1990s, Moore has been a key member of Poor Magazine, starting with the column “Illin-N-Chillin” and then as founding member of the magazine’s school, the Homefulness and Decolonize Academy. Moore is also a founding member of the National Black Disability Coalition and an activist around police brutality against people with disabilities, and has started and helped start organizations including Disability Advocates of Minorities Organization and Sins Invalid. His cultural work includes film documentary Where Is Hope, Police Brutality Against People with Disabilities, spoken-word CDs, poetry books and the children’s book Black Disabled Art History 101, published by Xochitl Justice Press.

Keith Jones is the President and CEO of SoulTouchin’ Experiences LLC, an organization aimed at bringing a perspective to the issues of access inclusion and empowerment, which affect him as well as others who are persons with and without disabilities. The issues he tackles are wide ranging, from immigration, criminal justice reform, and health care to environmental justice. Paralleling his policy and social justice work, Mr. Jones is a multi-talented artist who along with Leroy Moore and Rob Temple co-founded Krip-Hop Nation, currently celebrating 13 years with the recent Emmy Award winning success of their title song for the Netflix documentary of the Paralympic Games, Rising Phoenix and its acclaimed soundtrack. 

Combining humor, playfulness, radical political perspectives, compassion and undeniable musical chops, Wheelchair Sports Camp is Denver's biggest smallest band. Fronted by the wheelchair using, rap heavy, beat-making, freedom fighting producer, educator, foul mouthed, queer rebel rouser Kalyn, the band is a combination of live and electronic instruments with a more noisy, jazzy, experimental, combination to the traditional hip-hop group. Raised by the DIY (Do It Yourself) spirit of experimental independence, the band has since relied on interdependence in order to stretch into theatre, performance art, public television, politics, prison tours, permanent installations, and more to come. The vinyl release of All Is Wonder will be in print soon. More here.

Jesse DJ Quad Morin is a disabled hip hop artist who became paralyzed at the age of 16 from a diving accident at Venice Beach in July of 1984. Once he started getting into DJing he would practice to perfect his craft, still not having full function of his arms and hands. As a producer/beat maker DJ Quad started a hip hop crew called 5th Battalion, with his best friend Fernando Escobar, that was showcased on the underground hip hop scene all over California. He and Leroy Moore got connected as the Krip-Hop Nation was taking off, and his work is on Krip-Hop Nation CD’s Vol’s 1, 2 and 3, Police Brutality Profiling, and Krip-Hop Nation’s 10 year anniversary album.

Toni Alika Hickman is not only a talented singer-songwriter; she is the survivor of two brain aneurysms and a stroke. Using her voice and music to inspire others, she has been featured on the Deborah Duncan Show, Radio One, featured in Shape magazine and other publications throughout the world. She has spoken at numerous colleges and other organizations on subjects of depression and recovery, physical, mental, and spiritual health, living one’s purpose, chemicals in beauty products, and a host of other subjects. She is a speaker/performer for YoungStroke and the American Heart Association, an author, artist, Certified Naturopath, mother, and activist, and Emmy Award winning artist for her role in the theme song for the Paralympics documentary Rising Phoenix. More at tonihickman.com.

* The line “The future lives in our bodies” is from the poem “Femme Futures” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.

• Poetry Coalition program news at Publishers Weekly

#KripHopNation #DisabilityJustice #PoetryCoalition

• This program also available via live-stream and at the same link after the event.

Supported by the National Endowment for the Arts

Join us at The Poetry Center (or tune in via live-stream) for this in-person reading and conversation with three friends and SF State alums. Matthew Clark Davison, Stacy D. Flood, and Patrick Earl Ryan will each be presenting their newly published fiction, and talking with each other and the audience. 

• Please note: proof of vaccination and mask are required in order to attend in person.

Matthew Clark Davison is the author of Doubting Thomas (Amble Press, 2021). He is creator and teacher of The Lab :: Writing Classes with MCD, a non-academic school started in 2007 in a friend's living room on Douglass Street. The textbook version of The Lab, co-authored by bestselling writer Alice LaPlante, will be published by Norton in 2022. His prose has been published in or on BOMB, LitHub, Lambda Literary, The Advocate, Exquisite Pandemic, Guernica, The Atlantic Monthly, Foglifter, Lumina Magazine, and others; and has been recognized with a Creative Work Grant, Cultural Equities Grant, Clark Gross Award for a Novel-in-Progress, and a Stonewall Alumni Award. He earned a BA and MFA in Creative Writing from SFSU, where he now teaches full-time in the BA/MA/MFA departments.

Stacy D. Flood, originally from Buffalo, and currently living in Seattle, has had his work published nationally, and performed on stages nationwide as well as in the Puget Sound Area. He has been an artist-in-residence at DISQUIET in Lisbon, as well as Millay Arts in New York, and he is the recipient of a Getty Fellowship to the Community of Writers. Published in 2021 by Lanternfish Press, The Salt Fields is his first novella.

Patrick Earl Ryan was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, in a family spanning 5 continents and 7 generations in the city. His debut short story collection If We Were Electric was chosen by Roxane Gay as the winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and published in 2020 by University of Georgia Press. His stories have appeared in Ontario Review, Pleiades, Best New American Voices, Men on Men: Best New Gay Fiction for the Millennium, Cairn, James White Review, and Gertrude; and he was the founder and editor-in-chief of the LGBTQ+ literary journal Lodestar Quarterly. More here.

Supported by the Dorothy A. Fowler Trust

• Video live-streamed to our YouTube channel. Media captioning available there after the event.

Join us as we welcome poets Chris Nealon—who'll be visiting the Bay Area to deliver The Poetry Center's annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture, the following evening (same time, same venue)—and Stephanie Young.

• Like the space heroes of his childhood, Nealon does not give in to the Dark Side in his poetry, retreat into “low-level intra-bourgeois competitiveness,” intellectualism, narcissism, or fear. Nor does he engage in “apocalypse braggadocio,” setting up the poet as a hero of the breakdown.... The primary thing I feel reading Chris Nealon’s The Shore is gratitude. Gratitude that he exists as a writer and thinker, as a human. Gratitude to him for writing this book, whose resonances only deepen in a COVID-crisis world. —Allison Cobb, Lambda Literary Review
   
• Stephanie’s work is wonderful, a kind of loping swirl full of pop references, half of which I don’t understand. But that doesn’t matter because the knit is strong material yet loose, leaving lots of space, through which a sense of reality floats and stays with me. In an age of con and artifice, I want this. —Judy Grahn

Chris Nealon is a Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Shore (Wave Books, 2020) as well as two books of literary criticism, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Duke, 2001) and The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century (Harvard, 2011), as well as three earlier books of poetry: The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004), Plummet (Edge Books, 2009), and Heteronomy (Edge, 2014). He lives in Washington, DC.

Stephanie Young lives and works in Oakland. Her books of poetry and prose include It’s No Good Everything’s Bad, Ursula or University, Picture Palace, and Telling the Future Off. Her latest book of poetry is Pet Sounds (Nightboat Books, 2019). She edited the anthology Bay Poetics, and with Juliana Spahr, A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism. Young is a member of the Krupskaya Books editorial collective.

Related event:
Chris Nealon, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: "George Oppen and the Future"

Event contact: 

The Poetry Center

Event phone: 

(415) 338-2227

Event sponsor: 

The Poetry Center

Introduced by Brandon Brown

The George Oppen Memorial Lecture is supported by the Dorothy A. Fowler Trust.

• Video live-streamed to our YouTube channel. Media captioning available there after the event.

We are delighted to host poet and scholar Chris Nealon to deliver the 36th annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture. Nealon's subject will be "George Oppen and the Future." Brandon Brown will introduce Nealon, with the event supported by the Dorothy A. Fowler Trust.

…Look around you now        and ask yourself

Which of these—

                The innovators, profit-makers, the ones behind high walls,

                                The ones who are planning for the great catastrophes—

                Or the ones with no ability to plan,

                Who live from hour to hour, year to year,

                                In whom terror waits to be uncurdled,

                Who live in the great wide world—

Which of these will be the victorious ones?

Nobody knows.

—Chris Nealon, from “The Victorious Ones”

Chris Nealon is a Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Shore (Wave Books, 2020) as well as two books of literary criticism, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Duke, 2001) and The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century (Harvard, 2011), as well as three earlier books of poetry: The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004), Plummet (Edge Books, 2009), and Heteronomy (Edge, 2014). He lives in Washington, DC.

Related event:

Chris Nealon and Stephanie Young, reading and in conversation

Recent Oppen Lectures:

Erica Hunt, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 12, 2020

Tyrone Williams, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 6, 2019

David Hobbs, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 2, 2017

Frances Richard, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 17, 2016

Roberto Tejada, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture: December 12, 2015

George Oppen at The Poetry Center:

Charles Reznikoff and George Oppen: February 19, 1963

George Oppen: February 21, 1968

George Oppen: October 29, 1969

Event contact: 

The Poetry Center

Event phone: 

(415) 338-2227

Event sponsor: 

The Poetry Center

With emcee Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta

• Video live-streamed to our YouTube channel. Media captioning available there after the event.

Join us as jayy dodd, whose book The Black Condition ft. Narcissus (Nightboat Books, 2019) — "an irreverently tender profile of Black trans life surviving and thriving during contemporary political turmoil" — was selected to receive the Poetry Center Book Award, reads from her work. She’ll be joined by award judge Lourdes Figueroa, in Oakland, who will read from her own work and engage in conversation. With emcee, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta.

• ...far more than a critical mirror or melancholy echo, dodd’s Narcissus emerges as a generative principle, birthing the most vulnerable of possibilities, and deftly intimate, if joyously irreverent, a critique. Their book is beautiful, voluptuous, daring, and demanding of new shapes for becoming, loving, and where necessary, destroying. jayy dodd is a genius and I will say that again. —Trish Salah
   
• If Amiri Baraka the poet, the pure technician, musician, chronicler of all that is black, blue, purple, and lyric, were to metamorphosize and return as a blxk trans femme in spirit they would be jayy dodd. dodd’s poetry captures the magic and the ‘tude, the swing, swagger, and tender hands of their experience. It’s an epic, a record, recording, A&B side, CD with a bonus track, most importantly it is gospel bristling with raw and tender truths and yearning. —Pamela Sneed

jayy dodd is a blxk trans womxn from Los Angeles, California– now based in Portland, OR. she is a literary & performance artist. her work has appeared / will appear in Broadly, The Establishment, Entropy, LitHub, BOAAT Press, Duende, and The Poetry Foundation among others. she is the Executive Director for Dovesong Labs (a development of Winter Tangerine), editor of A Portrait in Blues (Platypus Press 2017), author of Mannish Tongues (Platypus Press 2017) and The Black Condition ft. Narcissus (Nightboat Books 2019). she has been a Pushcart Prize nominee and co-editor of Bettering American Poetry. her visual & written work has been featured in West Hollywood, Portland’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Teen Vogue, and Entropy. she is also a volunteer gender terrorist & artificial intellectual. find her talking trash online or taking a selfie.

Lourdes Figueroa is the author of ​Ruidoso = To Learn Speak (Alley Cat Books Resident Writers Collection, December 2019) and yolotl (Spooky Actions, October 2012). Her artistic work involves "a series of poems, images & collaborations that are a dialogue of my lived experience when my family worked as migrant farmworkers in Yolo County, California... Overall, this is the writer that I am. My work tastes of pesticides, love, sweat, blood, and llanto. It relates to everything that we eat and are, it is about the stink of el azadón, the queer & brown in el azadón, everything to do with la x on our bodies, the femicides around us, the femicide of our earth & the nopal on my forehead. Quite honestly it is a life of migration = love. The poems are in constant conversation with each other. As the descendants of the nopal, they are the ancient un/remembered human heart. What inspired me to write was and is, survival." More at lourdesfigueroa.net

Event contact: 

The Poetry Center

Event phone: 

415-338-2227

Event sponsor: 

The Poetry Center

Supported by the National Endowment for the Arts

Cosponsored by The Poetry Center and The Green Arcade

• Video live-streamed to our YouTube channel. Media captioning available there after the event.

Join us on-site at The Green Arcade (where Market Street, Gough, Valencia, and Haight all intersect) for a reading of new prose works by local s/heroes Jaime Cortez and Camille Roy. The evening event is cosponsored by The Poetry Center and The Green Arcade. 

• Some people have to walk around with so many sad stories. They have to get up, brush their teeth, wash their face, go to work like everybody else, but they’re not like everyone else. Jaime Cortez is a wise guy with a wide heart, who sees what ‘no one else wants to see.’ These funny/tragic tales, luminescent with love, are lanterns for our dark times. —Sandra Cisneros
   
• What a voice, what a charming, idiosyncratic voice! Cortez tells the untold stories of California. Set what you know aside, lay your expectations on the couch next to you, put your feet up, pick up this book, and journey into land as real and complex as the state itself.—Rabih Alameddine
   
• This is a huge book; it belongs in the canon of the best queer writers. To read Honey Mine is to be inhabited by the largesse of the word ‘lesbian,’ body, sex, sexuality. And by a lesbian aesthetic of human relations, bookended by the author’s magnificent enduring love with her late partner Angie. These fictions, in resisting…before the theorems arrive… teleological primness, parade language nimble enough to absorb class, cities, memory, grief, shame, without sacrificing a cornucopia of pleasures. Like a tarte tatin, Honey Mine spills over with deliciousness. My tactic vis a vis narrative, says Camille Roy, is really just to bring abandonment into the relationship. She succeeds marvelously. —Gail Scott

Jaime Cortez is a graphic novelist, visual artist, writer, teacher, and occasional performer. Cortez has historically used art and humor to explore sexuality, social justice, HIV/AIDS, and Chicano identity. The first-ever collection of short stories by Jaime Cortez, Gordo (Black Cat/Grove Atlantic, 2021) is set in a migrant workers camp near Watsonville, California in the 1970s. 

Camille Roy’s most recent book is ​Honey Mine: Collected Stories, edited by Lauren Levin and Eric Sneathen (Nightboat Books, 2021). Other books include Sherwood Forest​ (Futurepoem), ​Cheap Speech​, a play from Leroy Chapbooks, and ​Craquer​, a fictional autobiography from 2nd Story Books, as well as ​Swarm​ (fiction, from Black Star Series). She co-edited ​Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative​ (Coach House 2005, re-issued 2010). Earlier books include ​The Rosy Medallions​ (poetry and prose, from Kelsey St. Press) and ​Cold Heaven​ (plays, from Leslie Scalapino’s O Books). Recent work has been published in Amerarcana and at Open Space (SFMOMA).

Event contact: 

The Poetry Center

Event phone: 

415-338-2227

Event sponsor: 

The Poetry Center and The Green Arcade

Supported by the Sam Mazza Foundation

• Video live-streamed to our YouTube channel. Media captioning available there after the event.

Poet Angel Dominguez, as The Poetry Center's 7th Mazza Writer in Residence, is guest writer in classes across the SF State campus during the week of October 11, 2021. They'll also present two public events, the latter of these with poet-performer Ronaldo V. Wilson, in the welcoming gallery space at Alley Cat Bookshop in San Francisco's Mission District. Please join us, in person or by live-stream video.

Angel Dominguez is a Latinx poet and artist of Yucatec Maya descent, born in Hollywood and raised in Van Nuys, CA, by their immigrant family. They’re the author of ROSESUNWATER (The Operating System, 2021) and Black Lavender Milk (Timeless, Infinite Light 2015). Angel earned a BA from the University of California Santa Cruz and an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder Colorado. You can find Angel’s work online and in print in various publications. You can find Angel in the redwoods or ocean. Their third book, DESGRACIADO (the collected letters) is forthcoming with Nightboat Books in 2022.

Interdisciplinary artist, poet, and scholar Ronaldo V. Wilson, Ph.D., is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh, 2008), Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other (Counterpath Press, 2015), and Lucy 72 (1913 Press, 2018). Two books, Wilson’s Carmelina: Figures (Wendy’s Subway, 2021) and Virgil Kills: Stories (Nightboat Books, 2022), are forthcoming. He is the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Kundiman, MacDowell, the Center for Art and Thought, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, among others.  Wilson is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at UC Santa Cruz, serving on the core faculty of the Creative Critical Ph.D. The program, and principal faculty of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

Related event

Mazza Writer in Residence Angel Dominguez and Hannah Kezema, reading and in conversation
Thursday, October 14, 1:00 pm at The Poetry Center, Humanities 512 

Event contact: 

The Poetry Center

Event phone: 

415-338-2227

Event sponsor: 

The Poetry Center

With emcee, Carlos Quinteros III

• Video live-streamed to our YouTube channel. Media captioning available there after the event.

• "...gut me and make me new..."
  —Dan Lau, from "Molt"

The Poetry Center is delighted to announce the New Voice Series, initiated in Spring 2021 as an annual reading series that will pair a poet alum of SF State, a current SF State graduate student poet in Creative Writing, and a current undergraduate student poet at SF State (any major), to each, read their work and engage in conversation. For the premiere event, poet Dan Lau has been invited to appear along with student poets Edward Gunawan and Carlos Osoria. Please join us!

Dan Lau. A Kundiman, William Dickey, and Kustra fellow, Dan Lau has received grants and awards from the GAPA Foundation, APICC, Queer Cultural Center, Browning Society of San Francisco, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He has accepted residencies at Caldera, Show Us Your Spines: A Radar Archives Residency, Willapa Bay AiR, and a Blue Mountain Center. He holds a B.A. from CUNY: Hunter College; an M.A. from San Francisco State University where he was the 2012 San Francisco State University Creative Writing Department Distinguished MA Graduate Honoree, and an M.F.A. in Poetry from Boise State University. Since 2012, Lau has worked at different capacities in grassroots fundraising. Currently, he serves his community as the Managing Poetry Editor at the award-winning Bay area-based literary journal, Foglifter, and as the Development Director at Kundiman, a national non-profit organization dedicated to nurturing generations of writers and readers of Asian American literature.

Edward Gunawan. A queer immigrant from Indonesia and of Chinese heritage, Edward Gunawan is a writer and interdisciplinary storyteller whose essay has been published in an Asian LGBTQ anthology Intimate Strangers (Signal 8 Press) and films have been screened in international film festivals such as Berlin, Locarno, and Clermont-Ferrand. He is also the creator of the award-winning webcomic Press Play, which was published as a chapbook by Sweet Lit in 2020. Now based in Oakland, he is pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, with the support of the Marcus Recruitment Award. Visit addword.com to learn more.

Carlos Osoria is a trans, Indigenous feminist activist. Their pronouns are she/her/they/them. Much of their fieldwork and research is centered around sex, gender, sexuality, and Ethnic studies; however, literary studies aren’t far from their scope either, as they also research lost queer and trans representations within the literature. They have written for The Ana a quarterly arts magazine. Currently, they are on a path to receive their BA in Comparative and World Literature and American Indian Studies with a minor in Queer Ethnic Studies. Community building, gossiping, and buying unneeded books are their favorite pastimes.

Event contact: 

The Poetry Center

Event email: 

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event sponsor: 

The Poetry Center, New Voice Series