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.

Natasha Dennerstein was born in Melbourne, Australia. She spent many years working as a psychiatric nurse which gave her an interesting perspective on the human condition. She has an MFA from San Francisco State University. Natasha has had poetry published in many journals including Landfall, Shenandoah, Bloom, Red Light Lit, Spoon River Poetry Review, Foglifter and North American Review. Her collections Anatomize (2015), Triptych Caliform (2016) and her novella-in-verse About a Girl (2017) were published by Norfolk Press in San Francisco. Her trans chapbook Seahorse (2017) was published by Nomadic Press in Oakland. She collaborated on a book with visual artist Kaye Freeman Turn and Face the Strange (2019). She lives in Oakland, California, where she is an editor at Nomadic Press and works at St James Infirmary, a clinic for sex-workers in San Francisco. She was a 2018 Fellow of the Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat.

Tomas Moniz edited Rad Dad, Rad Families, and the kids book Collaboration/Colaboración. He’s recently been published by Barrelhouse and Acentos Review. In 2019, he’ll release a chapbook with Mason Jar Press and his debut novel, Big Familia, on Acre Books, the book publishing offshoot of The Cincinnati Review. He has stuff on the internet but loves letters and pen pals: PO Box 3555, Berkeley CA 94703. He promises to write back.

Toni Newman is a 1985 graduate of Wake Forest University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology and candidate for Juris of Doctorate. Toni is author of the 2011 memoir I Rise-The Transformation of Toni Newman discussing her 25 year difficult transition.  I Rise was nominated in 2012 in 2 categories for the Lambda Literary Awards, honored in 2012 by Wake Forest University for Faces of Courage, and has been featured in the Advocate, Huffington Post and Ebony magazine. Toni is the Executive Director of St. James Infirmary in San Francisco.

Danny Thanh Nguyen’s short stories and personal essays have appeared in The Journal, South Dakota Review, Entropy, New Delta Review, Gulf Coast, and other magazines. He is editor of AS IS, an anthology of Vietnamese American art and literature, and has been awarded fellowships from Kundiman and Voices of Our Nation Foundation (VONA). Danny recently received an individual artist grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission for his collection of essays about parallel survivalism between Southeast Asian American refugee communities and queer leather communities in the post-AIDS epidemic era. He runs a social media persona project he calls “Sluterary Thirsterature” on Instagram: @engrishlessons.

Musical guest Freddie is a genre- and gender-fluid singer, songwriter, rapper, producer, and drag artist based in Berkeley, California. They have performed all over the East Bay and in San Francisco at “Black “Love! Music and poetry by black queer artists” at Strut in the Castro.