Yeva Johnson, Michael Warr and Chun Yu share their poetry in solidarity with Asian Americans and African Americans in a call for safety and peace for all communities and against all forms of violence and hatred. Yeva, also a flutist, performs music interludes between the poems. 

About the project:
The Two Languages / One Community project uses writing and translation to exchange culture and life experience between the Asian American and African American communities, which are often isolated from each other, even when they live in the same neighborhood or work together. TLOC shares stories and language to facilitate understanding, connection, and support.

About the artists:
Yeva Johnson, a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, musician, and physician whose work appears or is forthcoming in the Bellingham Review, Essential Truths:  The Bay Area in Color Anthology, Sinister Wisdom, Yemassee, and elsewhere, explores interlocking caste systems and possibilities for human co-existence in our biosphere.  Yeva is a past Show Us Your Spines Artist-in-Residence (RADAR Productions/SF Public Library), winner of the 2020 Mostly Water Art & Poetry Splash Contest, and poet in QTPOC4SHO, a small and sustaining San Francisco Bay Area artists’ collective.

Michael Warr’s books include Of Poetry & Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin (W.W. Norton), The Armageddon of Funk and We Are All The Black Boy.  His many literary honors include a 2021 San Francisco Artist Grant, 2020 Berkeley Lifetime Achievement Award, San Francisco Library Laureate, Creative Work Fund award for his multimedia project Tracing Poetic Memory, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature, Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award, Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poets Award, and a NEA Fellowship. His work is translated into Chinese by poet Chun Yu for their Two Languages / One Community Project.

Chun Yu, PhD, is a bilingual poet, graphic novelist, scientist, and translator. She is the author of the multi-award-winning memoir in free verse Little Green: Growing Up During the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Simon & Schuster) and a historical graphic novel in progress (Macmillan). She is a recipient of San Francisco Arts Commission grants for her poetry and graphic novel projects and an honoree of the 2020 YBCA 100 award for creative change-makers and community leaders, and more. Her work is taught in world history and culture classes around the world. Chun holds a B.S. and M.S. from Peking University and a Ph.D. from Rutgers University in biomaterials. She was a post-doctoral fellow in a Harvard-MIT joint program.