Poetic Tuesdays with Litquake

Name: Poetic Tuesdays with Litquake
Start: 2023-07-11T12:30:00-07:00
End: 2023-07-11T13:30:00-07:00
Location: Jessie Square, Yerba Buena Gardens

Tue, Jul 11, 12:30pm – 1:30pm

Free

Line 85

Date:: Tue, Jul 11
Time:: 12:30pm – 1:30pm
Venue:: Jessie Square, Yerba Buena Gardens
760 Mission St.
San Francisco, CA + Google Map
Phone:: (415) 543-1718
Cost:: Free

(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

devorah major served as San Francisco’s Third Poet Laureate. She is a poetry performance artist who performs her work nationally and internationally with and without musicians. She has two poetry/jazz CDs with Daughters of Yam and is featured on several others. She has seven poetry books, the most recently califia’s daughter, two novels, four chapbooks and a host of short stories, essays, and poems in anthologies and periodicals.

Shizue Seigel is a third-generation Japanese American who explores complex intersections of history, culture and spirituality through prose, poetry and visual art. The child of former incarcerees, she grew up in segregated Baltimore, Occupied Japan, California farm labor camps and skid-row Stockton. She’s a college dropout whose lived experience includes the Haight-Ashbury, Indian ashrams, corporate advertising, HIV prevention in public housing and San Francisco’s activist arts community. She is the founder/director of Write Now! SF Bay, which supports writers and artists of color through workshops, events and anthologies. Her eight books include five Write Now! anthologies, most recently Uncommon Ground: BIPOC Journeys to Creative Activism.

Landon Smith (he/him) is a father, a tenured professor, a Pushcart nominated poet, half Mende and half Balanta & Fulani, the amethyst geode on your desk, Angela Davis’ afro, Frantz Fanon’s pocket notebook, Walter Rodney’s fingernail and your favorite pillow. Despite his institutional degrees, he really became a poet through the East Side Arts Alliance in Oakland. Landon thanks his sister Alia for buying him his first journal, Brit Hill for pushing him to read poetry in public and Black Freighter press for publishing his first book – No Bedtime Stories of Soil. Abolish all prisons and police.

Kathryn Waddell Takara, PhD is a winner of the (BCF) 2010 American Book Award and has published over 300 poems and 11 books of poetry and numerous academic articles. She is currently a writer and traveling performance poet since retiring from the University of Hawai’i as a widely traveled professor and public scholar of ethnic and Africana Studies. She has traveled within the USA as well as Europe, West and South Africa and Eastern China. She was born and raised in Tuskegee, Alabama, educated at George School and Tufts on the East Coast and studied in France. She earned a M.A. in French from the University of California, Berkeley and moved to Hawai`i in 1968, where she earned a PhD in Political Science from the University of Hawai’i at Ma̵noa, wrote and taught for 31 years.

Raymond Nat Turner (“The Town Crier”), is a NYC poet privileged to have read at the Harriet Tubman Centennial Symposium. He is Artistic Director of the stalwart JazzPoetry Ensemble UpSurge!NYC and has appeared at numerous festivals and venues including the Monterey Jazz Festival and Panafest in Ghana West Africa. He currently is Poet-in-Residence at Black Agenda Report and former Co-Chair of the New York Chapter of the National Writers Union (NWU). Turner has opened for such people as James Baldwin, People’s Advocate Cynthia, sportswriter Dave Zirin and CA Congresswoman Barbara Lee following her lone vote against attacking Afghanistan.

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:

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Poetic Tuesdays

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