“When remembering Hand, one should look up.”– Ayodele Nzinga
Join us as we celebrate the life and craft of QR Hand Jr with the launch of his last book Out of Nothing, published by Black Freighter Press. Featuring poets Ayodele Nzinga, Devorah Major, Kim Shuck, Tony Aldarondo, and Tongo Eisen-Martin
BIOS
Q. R. Hand, Jr. was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1937. He is the author of three poetry books, i speak to the poet in man (jukebox press, 1985), how sweet it is (Zeitgeist Press, 1996), and whose really blues, new & selected poems (Taurean Horn Press, 2007). He was a member of the poetry and jazz ensemble Word Wind and worked as a community mental health worker in San Francisco, where he lived for more than four decades. He died on December 31, 2020.
Ayodele 'WordSlanger' Nzinga, MFA, Ph. D. is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Oakland, CA. She hosts the Winter in America SpeakEasy. Nzinga is a multi-disciplined artist, community advocate, arts educator, and cultural architect invested in creating structures that facilitate cultural production. Working at the intersections of community well-being, cultural sovereignty, transformation, and change, Nzinga is a renaissance woman, an author, director, producer, thespian, and dramaturge. A member of the Alameda County Women's Hall of Fame, Nzinga's work for the stage is internationally recognized. Ayodele is the founding director of the Lower Bottom Playaz, Inc., Oakland's oldest North American African Theater Company, the only company in the world to produce the August Wilson American Century Cycle in chronological order. Ayodele is founding director of the Black Arts Movement Business District Community Development Corporation of Oakland, Producing Director of BAMBDFEST International Biennial, and Lead Curator of BAM House Black Cultural Center. Nzinga is a YBCA 10 Fellow, a YBCA Creative Corps Fellow, and California Arts Council Legacy Artist. Ayodele is a founding member of BlacSpace Collective, and co-founder of Janga's House Black Woman's Arts Collective. Her work appears in numerous anthologies, including Sparkle + Blink, Painting the Streets, The Patrice Lumumba Anthology, 14 Hills, African American Journal of Poetry, African Voices, and Magnolia Journal; she is the recurring Editor of the Black August issue of Blackbird Press & Review, and Co-Editor of The Town Anthology. Ayodele is the author of Performing Literacy: A Narrative Inquiry into Performance Pedagogy, The Horse Eaters, SorrowLand Oracle, and Incandescent.
Devorah Major A California born, San Francisco raised, granddaughter of immigrants, documented and undocumented, devorah major served as San Francisco's Third Poet Laureate (2002-2006). She has published two novels, four poetry books and four poetry chapbooks, along with two young adult titles, and a host of short stories, essays, and individual poems published in anthologies and periodicals. Among her awards is a First Novelist award from the Black Caucus of the ALA and a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award. Along with composer Guillermo Galindo, major was given a commission by the Oakland East Bay Symphony to create Trade Routes, a symphony with spoken word and chorus that premiered in 2005. In June 2015 she premiered her poetry play Classic Black: Voices of 19th-Century African-Americans in San Francisco at the San Francisco International Arts Festival. She is currently the poet-in-residence at the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums and a Senior Adjunct Professor at California College of the Arts. More info and writing can be found at www.devorahmajor.com
Kim Shuck embraces the fool and jester qualities of being a modern poet and artist. She is a devotee of San Francisco, whose hills she wanders nearly always on foot. Her maternal grandparents met at the Polish Hall on Shotwell and she spent many hours with her mother and grandmother wandering the Mission St. Miracle Mile, taking books out of the Mission Branch library and watching aquarium fish on the ground floor of what used to be Hale's. She firmly believes in carrying a bubble wand, keys, pen and notebook and cats cradle string at all times. Shuck is widely published in journals, anthologies and a couple of solo books. She enjoys volunteering in SFUSD elementary school classrooms to share her loves of origami, poetry and basket making... in other words, math of various kinds. In 2019 Shuck was awarded an inaugural National Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, and a PEN Oakland Censorship Award.
Tongo Eisen-Martin was born in San Francisco and received an MA from Columbia University. He is the author of Blood on the Fog (City Lights Publishers, 2021), Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights Publishers, 2017), which received the California Book Award and an American Book Award, and Someone’s Dead Already (Bootstrap Press, 2015). A poet, movement worker, and educator, Eisen-Martin’s latest curriculum on the extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country.
Black Freighter Press publishes revolutionary books founded by Alie Jones & Tongo Eisen-Martin. We are committed to the exploration of liberation, using art to transform consciousness. A platform for Black and Brown writers to honor ancestry and propel radical imagination. We aim to create a world where the collective determines cultural reality.