Lines and lyrics from Litquake Nation! Enjoy line breaks during your lunch break, as some of the Bay Area’s best poets and musicians share their work in the great outdoors.

Oakland-based writer, MK CHAVEZ is the author of several chapbooks including Mothermorphosis. Dear Animal, her first full collection, was released in October 2016 by Nomadic Press. Chavez is co-founder/curator of the reading series Lyrics & Dirges, curator of Uptown Fridays, and co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival. Chavez’s poem “The New Whitehouse, Finding Myself in The Ruins,” was selected by Eileen Myles for the 2017 Cosmonauts Avenue Poetry Award. She has been selected as a 2017 CantoMundo Fellow.

TONGO EISEN-MARTIN was born in San Francisco and received an MA from Columbia University. He is the author of someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015), which was nominated for a California Book Award. Also a human rights activist and educator, he has taught at Columbia University and in detention centers across the country. He lives in San Francisco.

RACHEL RICHARDSON is the author of two books of poetry, Copperhead (2011) and Hundred-Year Wave (2016), both selections in the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University. Rachel is the Co-founder of Left Margin LIT, a literary arts center in Berkeley, California. She also directs poetry programming for the Bay Area Book Festival. She lives with the writer David Roderick and their two children in Berkeley.

SHELLEY WONG is the author of the Diode Editions chapbook RARE BIRDS. Her poems have recently appeared in Crazyhorse, Fairy Tale Review, The Volta, Sixth Finch, and Southern Humanities Review. She is a Kundiman fellow and a Pushcart Prize recipient, and she lives in Oakland.

Musical guest ASTRALOGIK is a creation of 2 human beings who experiment with their music the same way they do their identity. Womyn of the API community, both queer and in a deep relationship with one another romantically and creatively, they create a conversation using different genres till they can find a sonic agreement through various instrumental mediums. They bring reggae, soul, world, electronic, pop, classical and R&B music filled with the intention of healing, connection, and equality.

The Poetic Tuesdays series is guest curated by Litquake’s Brynn Saito. Brynn is the author of two books of poetry, Power Made Us Swoon (2016) and The Palace of Contemplating Departure (2013), which won the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award from Red Hen Press and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Her poetry has been anthologized by Helen Vendler and Ishmael Reed; it has also appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She is the recipient of a Kundiman Asian American Poetry Fellowship and winner of the Key West Literary Seminar’s Scotti Merrill Memorial Award. Originally from Fresno, CA, Brynn teaches and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.