(Second Tuesdays with Litquake and fourth Tuesdays with MoAD)

Sharing works that delight, provoke, inspire and rouse, the twice monthly Poetic Tuesdays series runs from May through August, turning lunchtime into an oasis of creative expression. Lighting up the Gardens with a fabulously curated line-up of poets and musicians, Poetic Tuesdays offer a vivifying midday breather for neighborhood groups, students, office workers on break and even out-of-towners looking for respite from The City’s hustle and bustle.

About the Artists

Paul Corman-Roberts is author of the Firecracker nominated poetry collection Bone Moon Palace from Nomadic Press (2021) and most recently the graphic chapbook The Sincere from Libran Apocaplyse Books (2022.) An original founder and organizer of the Beast Crawl Lit Festival (Summer Beast 2022 – Beast Crawl Literary Festival) he currently teaches workshops for the Older Writer’s Lab, the San Francisco Creative Writing Institute and the Oakland Unified School District. He sometimes fills in as a drummer for the U.S. Ghostal Service, The Jennifer Blowdryer Band and the Poznansky Sisters, but mostly he is just exhausted. 

Cassandra Dallett has been published in over a hundred online and print magazines, was named a writer to watch in 7×7 magazine 2016, look for links at cassandradallet.com. Cassandra hosts the monthly writing workshop OnTwoSix, and co-hosts the quarterly reading series Moon Drop Productions. Her first full-length book of poetry Wet Reckless (Manic D Press) was released in 2014. In 2015, she authored five chapbooks one of  them, On Sunday, A Finch (Nomadic Press) was nominated for a California Book Award. 2018 brought the release of another full-length collection, Collapse, also on Nomadic Press, most recently A Pretty Little Wilderness on Be About it Press 2020.

Jenny Qi is the author of Focal Point, winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize. Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, ZYZZYVA and elsewhere. She has received support from organizations such as Tin House, Omnidawn, Kearny Street Workshop, the San Francisco Writers Grotto, the Brown Handler Residency and SWWIM. Born in Pennsylvania to Chinese immigrants, she grew up mostly in Las Vegas and now lives in San Francisco, where she completed her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology. She has been translating her late mother’s memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and immigration to the U.S. and is working on more essays and poems in conversation with this work.

Shilpa Kamat is a poet, educator and healing arts practitioner with an MFA in Creative Writing. Her writing, which ranges from ecopoetics to speculative/experimental, has been published by Cutleaf Journal, Strange Horizons, On Spec, sPARKLE & bLINK, Jaggery, SAND Journal, Fantasy Magazine, Willowherb Review, Solarpunk Magazine, Colossus anthologies, Kweli, and Plainsongs and is forthcoming in The Margins. Her chapbook, Saraswati Takes Back the Alphabet, was a  finalist for the Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize and was published by Newfound. Her creativity also finds expression in cooking, parenting, visual art making, prose writing and connecting with the natural world, especially forests. You can read more about her work at shilpakamat.com.

Sara Biel is a poet, visual artist and social worker living in Oakland, CA. She is co editor of the Colossus Press anthology series. Sara has had poems published in Button Eye Review, Beyond Words literary magazine and in Streetlight magazine. Her work has been included in “Our Spirits Carry our Voices” and ‘Words Upon the Waters.” Her chapbook, Prescribed Burn, was published on Finishing Line Press in February of 2023.

Litquake Curator:
Karla Brundage is author of two books of poetry, including Swallowing Watermelons and co-author of Mulatta–Not So Tragic. Her work as editor and publisher for Pacific Raven Press has included authors in the Bay Area, Hawaii, Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya in the following anthologies: Sisters Across Oceans, Our Spirits Carry Our Voices and Black Rootedness: 54 Poets from Africa to America. Media credits include Sister Power on ThinkTech Hawaii, C-SPAN, LitSeen, Wanda’s Picks and Chills at Will Podcast. Her poetry, essays and short stories can be found in Konch, Literary Magazine, sPARKLE & bLINK, MiGoZine, Black Fire This Time, Essential Truths and A Gathering of Tribes: Black Lives Matter Issue and her upcoming book Blood Lies: Race Trait(d)or (Finishing Line Press 2024). A graduate of Vassar College, Mills College MFA Program and San Francisco State Clinical Schools Project, Karla is founder of West Oakland to West Africa Poetry Exchange.

Co-Presented by: