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.

Jason Bayani is the author of Amulet from Write Bloody Press. He’s an MFA graduate from Saint Mary’s College, a Kundiman fellow, and works as the Artistic Director for Kearny Street Workshop. Jason performs regularly around the country and recently debuted his solo show, “Locus of Control” in 2016.

Joyce Lee is a writer, educator and performance poet. Joyce is an Oakland, California native whose gift with words and expression have made her an international talent and a surprise to herself. Growing up ignorant to her own poverty and reared in a hyper-conservative religion that often silenced womyn is what made Joyce Lee the blunt activist and fierce womynist she is. Although Joyce was a late bloomer to performance poetry (she didn’t know it existed until 2008) Joyce Lee is the 2009 and 2010 Oakland Grand Slam champion, the 2014 Ill List champion, a storyteller for NPR’s Snap Judgement and is working on her first book of collected writings entitled My Soul Is A Witness.

Dean Rader’s debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize and Landscape Portrait Figure Form (2014) was named by The Barnes & Noble Review as a Best Poetry Book of the year. He has won numerous awards for his writing, including the 2016 Common Good Books Prize, judged by Garrison Keillor. Dean writes and reviews regularly for The San Francisco Chronicle, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and The Huffington Post. Two new collections of poetry appeared in 2017: A book of collaborative sonnets written with Simone Muench, entitled Suture (Black Lawrence Press) and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon). Publisher’s Weekly writes “few poets capture the contradictions of our national life with as much sensitivity or keenness.”

Mg Roberts is the author of the poetry collections Anemal Uter Meck (Black Radish Books, 2017) and not so, sea (Durga Press, 2014). She is a Kundiman Fellow, Kelsey Street Press member, VONA/Voices Alum, and sits on the Board of Small Press Traffic. Her work has appeared in Dusie, Bombay Gin, Web Conjunctions, Elderly and elsewhere. Currently, she is co-editing Responses, New Writing, Flesh with Ronaldo Wilson and Bhanu Kapil; an anthology on the urgency of avant-garde writing written for and by writers of color. She lives in Oakland with three daughters, two hens, one puppy, and geologist husband.

Musical guest Cynthia Lin is a modern day jazz ukulele diva based in San Francisco, California. The creator of the #100DaysofUkuleleSongs project, Cynthia is known for her dazzling ukulele acoustic covers and tutorials on YouTube.