No Kings,No Queens Chess Club is the super-chill community chess club that gathers the 1st Sunday of every month in the galeria. Hosted by Danny Cao, all ages and skill levels are encouraged to come. Never played chess? We'll teach you! Come hang out, talk chess and play a few games.

Join us for an afternoon art talk with Amanda Ayala whose solo exhibit LIBROS is currently up in our galeria. Amanda will be in conversation with Josiah Luis Alderete about her beautiful y chinogn exhibit, her art practice, her inspirations, her suenops and her hustle as a working class artist. Expect lots of love and chisme for real.

Amanda Ayala is an interdisciplinary Xicana Indigenous artist and maker who centers people targeted by oppression and acknowledges their brilliance. Amanda leads and facilitates workshops that combine artist liberation and social justice for people of all ages. She creates within community as a way to heal and transform society.  linktr.ee/xicanaollin

“Here are some of my books…sketchbooks, notebooks, journals, books I sewed together, books gifted and filled, books that hold things I want to remember, things others have shared with me and commitments I have made to and for myself. When we create, these pieces of ourselves are reflections of hours and generations of thinking, feeling, trying, changing, experiencing and dreaming. These books are filled with this and more, lots of experimenting, painting, drawing, gluing, sewing, layering. Look through them and you can see some of my mind and life. I wonder how they might remind you of anything you have been through, anything you want for yourself and for the world. What books have you filled/would you fill?”-Amanda Ayala  

Other Dimensions in Sound is our Friday music series curated and hosted by Boohaabian multi reed player extraordinare David Boyce. Each week David will be inviting different musical guests to join him in our galeria for a night of sonic sustenance.

Tonight’s musical medicina is being provided by David Boyce(reeds and efx)and Ben Davis(Cello)

Mala Influencia es un taller creativo de serigrafía, producción gráfica y textil dirigido por Ximena Ortiz en Bogotá, Colombia.
Desde allí desarrolla el proyecto de cartel y fanzine PUNK POSTERS, que reúne gráfica contemporánea de artistas e ilustradores de la escena punk a nivel mundial.
Hasta su séptima edición en 2024, Punk Posters ha contado con la colaboración de más de 100 personas.
En esta ocasión, Mala Influencia presenta parte de su trabajo, procesos, serigrafías y merch producida en Bogotá bajo la filosofía del hazlo tú mismo y el trabajo colectivo.

__________

Mala Influencia is a creative screen printing, graphic, and textile workshop led by Ximena Ortiz in Bogotá, Colombia.
From there, she develops the PUNK POSTERS project — a poster and zine series that brings together contemporary graphics from punk artists and illustrators around the world.
As of its seventh edition in 2024, Punk Posters has featured collaborations from over 100 people.
This time, Mala Influencia comes to share part of its work, processes, screenprints, and merch produced in Bogotá under the do-it-yourself philosophy and collective spirit.

The SF Indian Classical Session at Medicine for Nightmares is back on June 30th!

The Indian Classical Sessions are an informal gathering dedicated to sharing the meditative beauty, ecstatic energy, and sheer majesty of South Asian music. Hosted by percussionist, drumset and tabla player Sameer Gupta this gathering focuses on curating 4 short live sets that represent different influences and traditions surrounding South Asian music. Our goal is to connect, build our raga music loving community, and share South Asian classical music in an impromptu, casual and attentive setting.

Featured sets are:

Neeraj Naik, bansuri & Rajan Arora, sitar

Vanita Mundhra, kathak dance

Ben Kunin, sarod

Shreyas Muralidharan, vocal

7pm show starts, $10 at the door!

San Francisco Solidarity Collective hosts Letter Writing and Correspondence Night

Our focus is on prison abolitionist work centered on the struggle of people in prison, jails, and immigrant and juvenile detention centers locally and worldwide. Join us for exchanging letters, starting a pen-pal, or just one-time birthday cards. No commitment necessary We will provide statements from incarcerated individuals, addresses, stamps, and envelopes. We got you, come write with us familia.

Colectivo de Solidaridad de San Francisco
 Noche de Escritura de Cartas y Correspondencias.
 Nuestro enfoque está en el trabajo abolicionista de las prisiones,
centrado en la lucha de las personas en prisiones, cárceles y centros
de detención juvenil y de inmigrantes a nivel local y mundial. Únase con nosotros para intercambiar cartas, iniciar amistades por correspondencia o simplemente escribir tarjetas de cumpleaños. No es necesario comprometerse. Nosotros proveeremos declaraciones de las personas encarceladas, direcciones, sellos y sobres.
¡Estamos para ti! Vengan a escribir con nosotros familia!

Is zine making a dead art form? Has ai ruined comics? Well, no. At Enjoy Zine Festival independent creators and lovers of the craft will get to connect irl. This is a free, all ages event July 27th from 1-6pm at Medicine for Nightmares. With zines and comics that center sharing knowledge, collaboration, intersectional identities, and human journeys.

At Medicine for Nightmares for the second year. EZ Fest has added a few more makers to share space with. Come watch the poetry performances and be silly with your friends for the photobooth. Come enjoy a welcoming atmosphere centering the community, working with what we have, and giving ourselves permission to feel joy. Hosted by ZINE.tv/@onzine.tv.

Join us tonight for a heavy dose of musical medicina with The Broken Rhythms Collective.

The Deciphering Broken Rhythms Collective (DBRC) includes Scott Oshiro on Flute, Francis Wong on Tenor Saxophone, DJean Vasciannie on Drums, and Kumi Maxson on Bass. They explore new approaches, philosophies and spiritual experiences in Jazz through an Afrofuturistic lens using the music as a tool for liberation. Melding Jazz, Hip‑Hop, and Electronic music, this immersive project explores the shared properties between improvisation, quantum physics, and the cosmos. By leveraging quantum computer powered improvisation systems the ensemble brings quantum phenomena into live musical performances, illuminating new dimensions of Jazz. DBRC also engages deeply with cultural narratives incorporating themes of generational trauma, mental health, racial and cultural identity. Their work acts as a counterpoint to Silicon Valley’s history of displacement, demonstrating how emergent technology can be reclaimed, repurposed, and used to amplify the voices of communities of color. 

Making poetry in color: The art of the Xicanx word is an intergenerational, multi-border storm of poets coming together to share their words in all the colors of the rainbow-raza Featuring Stalina Villareal and their debut book of poetry, Watcha (Vellum Press 2024), who is in the Town from Houston, Texas. Stalina will be joined by Oakland and San Francisco-based poets arnoldo colibri, hector son of hector and Lourdes Figueroa.

Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal (she/they) sees, hears, feels, and communicates across mediums and cultures. She’s a deep-watching ekphrastic poet, a photographic eco-essayist, a broad-stroke sketch artist, a sonic improv performer, a sound-sensitive literary translator, and an assistant professor of English. Their bilingualism stems from her 1.5-generation experience being both Mexican and Xicanx. Her debut collection of poetry called Watcha is out now from Deep Vellum Publishing. Their poetry can be found in the Rio Grande Review, Texas Review, The Acentos Review, Defunkt Magazine, and elsewhere. Her published translations of poetry include Enigmas by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Photograms of My Conceptual Heart Absolutely Blind by Minerva Reynosa, Kilimanjaro by Maricela Guerrero, and Postcards in Braille by Sergio Pérez Torres. Stalina is the recipient of the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry and one of the BIPOC Arts Network and Fund 2025 Artist Awards. Their visual poetry—spanning queer erotica, interactive digital art, and video installation—was part of the Antena@Blaffer exhibit at University of Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum. She is currently writing ekphrastic elegies about her interpretative drawings of portraits and a memoir about her photographs of nature—revealing her ability to look backward and within, to write new ways forward.

arnoldo garcía, colibri, (él, he, him) is originally from the south Texas border. He is a trans-language community-based poet-writer & organizer and the publisher/editor of editorial Xingao, a press dedicated to disseminating poets the color of the land. You can catch up on his work at artofthecommune.wordpress.com

hector son of hector is from Long Beach, CA and currently lives in Oakland. He is the child of Mexican immigrants, works in a hospital, dreams of short stories and writes poetry in secret.

Lourdes Figueroa is an oral queer chicanx poet & an award winning poetry filmmaker whose work is in dialogue of her lived experience when her family worked in el azadón—tilling the soil under the blistering sun. Lourdes is the author of the chapbooks yolotl, Ruidos = To Learn Speak, & most recent Vuelta from Nomadic Press. Her poem “Pieces from YOLOTL” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize 2022 by “Quite Lightning” & is a recipient of The San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literature Award for Poetry. Discover her latest poems in the Mexican Journal Tierra Adentro & latest film Las Marimacha Fragments made in collaboration with Filmmaker Peggy Peralta within 3rd Thing’s Press A Good Symptom: A Serial Anthology of Time Based Disturbances. Lourdes celebrates your pocha marimachita tongue. A native of limbo nation, she continues to believe in your lung & your throat.

Other Dimensions in Sound is our Friday music series curated and hosted by Boohaabian multi reed player extraordinare David Boyce. Each week David will be inviting different musical guests to join him in our galeria for a night of sonic sustenance.

Tonight’s soulful and cosmic vibes are being provided by guitarist/vocalist Angel.

Soulful, ethereal, and transcendental, Angel’s sound is a fusion of guitar and voice—blending ambient textures, jazz rap’s message-driven flow, and the reverence of reggae. 27-year-old Angelo Idrovo, known as Angel, was born in Manhattan and raised across the tri-state area of NJ/NY/PA. A cross-country road trip brought him to the Bay on a wave of synchronicities, where he’s now based and building his sound and sharing it through live performances and digital platforms. Follow his journey on YouTube, Instagram, and Tik Tok under Soul Speakings.

Explore the influence of dreams, dream recollection and dream interpretation in poetry. We will discuss the ways in which poetry simulates the variability of dream states, source dream memories for the content of our poems, and develop dream poems to then draft in handmade chapbooks and workshop as a group. Much of the workshop will focus on the connections between memory, middling states of consciousness, sleep phases, and how they can be structurally and imaginatively woven into the writing process.  

Connie Mae Oliver is a poet and artist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her first book of poems, Cosmos A Personal Voyage by Carl Sagan Ann Druyan Steven Soter And Me (Operating System, 2017) is about nuclear disarmament. Her second book, Science Fiction Fiction (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020) is an homage to Miami-Dade County and color photography in the early aughts. Her first novel, Close Encounters, is forthcoming in 2026 from Texas Review Press. This poetry workshop is an extension of her most recent collection of poems, dormilona (Burrow Press, 2025), which focuses on dreams and matrilineal memory. 

Un espacio íntimo para compartir lecturas latinoamericanas, recorrer paisajes y voces únicas de la región, y abrir conversaciones que nos atraviesan y nos invitan a pensar juntxs.

An intimate space to share Latin American literature, explore the region’s unique voices and landscapes, and open up conversations that move us and invite us to think together.

Líneas del Sur is a book membership program designed to connect passionate Spanish-speaking readers with the rich literary landscape of Latin America. Members explore fresh voices from the region through carefully curated books, contextual articles, and editorial notes. The experience is enriched by lively conversations in both online and in-person book clubs, fostering a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts.

This month’s book is Las Aventuras de la China Iron de Gabriela Cabezon Camara. Copies are available at Medicina Para Pesadillas.

A live late show just like the good old days! El Late Night Show with host Marisol Medina Cadena will take on local politics, culture and consejos before a live audience and trade chismes y cuentos with special guests from La Mision.

Our very special neighborhood guests tonight are Louie from La Reina Bakery, Betty la Bella Pazmino and Xiomara from ALAP(All Latinos Are Perfect). Featuring Jessica Martinez, Kevin Chef Papa Chulx Gallindo on cue cards and booty shorts, set design by Rebecca Flores, and opening monologue and general chingadera by Josiah Luis Pocho.

Betty Pazmiño, or Betty la Bella, is a homegirl de la Misión with tell-it-like-it-is humor and over 35 years experience as a San Francisco teacher.

Jessica Martinez writes plays, screenplays, children’s books, novels and zines about underdogs who find their power through comedic misadventures.

Drop everything and prepare for the BOOHAB as the one and only Broun Fellinis return to the Portal tonight for an evening of Afrofuturist vibes and Metabolicous music. Aphrokubist Improvisations and Chocolate Surrealism will abound so bring two jetpacks for this one jack.

David Boyce-electronics and saxophones

Kevin Carnes -samples and drums

Kirk Peterson-bass

Other Dimensions in Sound is our Friday music series curated and hosted by Boohaabian multi reed player extraordinare David Boyce. Each week David will be inviting different musical guests to join him in our galeria for a night of sonic sustenance.

Tonight we have a particularly heavy dose of sonic sustenance being provided by Red Fast Luck(David Boyce-reeds and electronics/PC Munoz boomstick,electric cajon, and percussion and special guests Evelyn Ficarra on sound design and Chris Evans on Cello) and Deciphering Broken Rhythms Collective(ongoing musical project of Scott Oshiro-flute)

Come gather and hear decolonized verses, spanglish poesia, Latine spokenword, Pocho poems and neighborhood chisme at Speaking Axolotl, the Bay Area’s long running monthly Latine Reading series. This month’s two very special and chingon features are Fresno Poet Laureate Aideed Medina and, zooming in from Buenos Aires, poet and publisher of Cae De Maduro libros Hernan.

Aideed Medina is Fresno’s current Poet Laureate.  Her work has appeared, in various publications including The Common, Farmworkers Portfolio, Issue #26, Amherst College, Somos Xicanas Anthology, and Riot of Roses Publishing House. She is the author of
31 Hummingbird by Editorial Xingao,
Segmented Bodies, from Prickly Pear Press. and Cuerpos Segmentados, Universidad Autónoma, Nuevo León, MX

Hernan nació en buenos aires un sábado de carnaval de 1971. empezó a leer en público en 1988 en el centro parakultural. participó de verbonautas (1995/2000) junto a quienes editó el libro conjunto “acción poética” (libros del rojas/eudeba).
algunos de sus poemas fueron musicalizados por ariel minimal, gigio gonzález, flopa lestani, pata kramer y nadia sapag. comparte talleres de poesía y clínicas de obra.
es responsable del sello de poesía cae de maduro.
desde 1994 editó dieciséis libros de poemas, el casi ensayo “la poesía está en ser uno - los libros de vicente luy” y seis discos de poemas tres de ellos audiovisuales, la mayoría en forma independiente.
el último de ellos se llama ”libro”.

10 slot open mic opens up a las 6;50pm first come first serve. Open mic poets have six minutes MAX.

NOTA; Speaking Axolotl is a BIPOC reading series which means black and brown poets on the mic. Whyte folks are welcome to attend and listen but your presence is not required.

Professor Nolan L. Cabrera reads and discusses his book “Banned! The Fight For Mexican Studies in the Streets and the Courts”.

Before the attacks on Critical Race Theory and DEI, the state of Arizona banned the highly successful Tucson Unified School District's Mexican American Studies Program. This book talk will tell the unbelievable, true story of the resistance to this state-sponsored racism - offering guidance about navigating the current repressive times.  

Dr. Nolan Cabrera is a nationally-recognized expert in the areas of racism/anti-racism, Whiteness, and Ethnic Studies. He is currently a Professor in the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona, and was the only academic featured in the MTV documentary White People. He is the author of the award-winning book White Guys on Campus, and he was an expert witness in the Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican American Studies case (Gonzalez v. Douglas) – the highest-profile ethnic studies case in the country’s history.  He has given hundreds of lectures, keynote addresses, and trainings, throughout the country. Dr. Cabrera recently published two books: Whiteness in the Ivory Tower (2024, Teachers College Press) and Banned! (2025, Cambridge University Press).

San Francisco Solidarity Collective hosts Letter Writing and Correspondence Night

Our focus is on prison abolitionist work centered on the struggle of people in prison, jails, and immigrant and juvenile detention centers locally and worldwide. Join us for exchanging letters, starting a pen-pal, or just one-time birthday cards. No commitment necessary We will provide statements from incarcerated individuals, addresses, stamps, and envelopes. We got you, come write with us familia.

Colectivo de Solidaridad de San Francisco
 Noche de Escritura de Cartas y Correspondencias.
 Nuestro enfoque está en el trabajo abolicionista de las prisiones,
centrado en la lucha de las personas en prisiones, cárceles y centros
de detención juvenil y de inmigrantes a nivel local y mundial. Únase con nosotros para intercambiar cartas, iniciar amistades por correspondencia o simplemente escribir tarjetas de cumpleaños. No es necesario comprometerse. Nosotros proveeremos declaraciones de las personas encarceladas, direcciones, sellos y sobres.
¡Estamos para ti! Vengan a escribir con nosotros familia!

143rd Dimension fka The Universe Is Lit: A Bay Area Black and Brown Punk Fest is happening TONIGHT in our galeria!

The 143rd Dimension is a reality-shifting sphere, centering and shaped by BIPOC artists across homelands, diasporas and genres. All who feel the vision are welcome to enter and co-create this blissful and transcendent portal. We are creating a web connecting us all in love, joy and resistance.

Featuring performances by:

Pride Month Barbie is the synth-pop duo formed in 2022 by solo artists Tyler Holmes and Josephine Shetty (aka Kohinoorgasm). As Libras, sluts, drama queens, and judgmental bitches, PMB brings a sound and performance that will leave you feeling insecure, horny, and annoyed. Inspired by 2000’s celebutantes, Gregg Araki, and acts like Handsome Furs, Yaz, Light Asylum, Cocteau Twins, and New Order, PMB brings a fun, dark edge to a candied electronic gloss. Check out their debut album All The Girls In The Room Say Sorry, out now everywhere!

ZERO CHARISMA, is a distinctive voice emerging from the rich tapestry of the Bay Area's artistic landscape. Her origin story as a queer, black, and indigenous afro-futurist fuels her work. More than just a performer, she is a self-reliant artist, producing every part of her mesmerizing content. Listeners often find themselves transported into a dreamlike state when enveloped by her melodies, reminiscent of meditative journeys and profound collective experiences. Zero Charisma’s music wraps you in a state of transcendence, as it bridges the stories of our spiritual realities, ethereal and grounded. Nature's vibrance and the interwoven magic of every living being form the core of her lyrical universe. As her voice layers and loops around itself forming haunting choruses, Zero Charisma builds a powerful current of song, improvising layers of lyrics, sometimes accentuated with the pulse of synths and beats.

From diary entries to the stage .Alchemy formed Glitter Ghost A project from the inland empire inspired by desert magic , fem rage , and chronic heartbreak . We give the rainbow , to you.

Grimas. Songs from the perspective of an anti-capitalist street dog.

Era 19 is a group of ERAdicators that came to evoke the beating of the heart and the breath of the word as the sword, bringing forth the era of the great reunification through the journey of the shadow and manifesting the balance between the “you” and the “I”

To let him tell it "Immortal Nightbody" is a code-name for an "anti-genre pop experiment" started during the pandemic after he snapped his ankle getting jumped outside of a liquor store NYE 2019. His music reflects his variegated creative influences: Post-Punk, Techno, and Shoegaze blended into contemporary rap and hip-hop.

Doors: 6:00

Suggested donation $10 -20

Other Dimensions in Sound is our Friday music series curated and hosted by Boohaabian multi reed player extraordinare David Boyce. Each week David will be inviting different musical guests to join him in our galeria for a night of sonic sustenance.

Tonight’s musical medicina is being provided by NAVA on harmonium.

Joiin us for a good old fashioned 7" lathe release party featuring e. saenz, silo homes, hauras, and upaharaka

e. saenz is somewhere between ocean and wildflowers

Hauras, Finnish for "fragile," Hauras is interested in employing repetition, decay and chaos to help find a space where a song can exist. In doing so, Hauras attempts to expose and explore the psychology of society at the end of civilization. Hauras is Howard Ryan, San Francisco

silo homes an experimental drone project that seeks to balance spatial, timbral, and melodic considerations to create something equally searching and welcoming

Upaharaka - burn out disappeared ritual ambient

Join us for an event with journalist Kylie Cheung to discuss her new book, Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the horrors inflicted by abortion bans began immediately and haven't stopped. These laws have become a tool for abusers, as pregnant people face legal harassment, reproductive coercion, and life-threatening medical trauma. Through biting analysis, Cheung argues that these aren’t unintended consequences, but deliberate acts of state-perpetrated violence inflicted on women and pregnant people, particularly those with the least resources and agency under capitalism and white supremacy.
Capitalism has always consciously decided whose lives are expendable. This book is for everyone coming to terms with this fact in the era of the rollback of our bodily autonomy.

Kylie Cheung is a Brooklyn-based journalist and the author of Survivor Injustice. Her work on reproductive rights and gender-based violence has appeared in Jezebel, Salon, Teen Vogue, and more.

San Francisco Solidarity Collective hosts Letter Writing and Correspondence Night

Our focus is on prison abolitionist work centered on the struggle of people in prison, jails, and immigrant and juvenile detention centers locally and worldwide. Join us for exchanging letters, starting a pen-pal, or just one-time birthday cards. No commitment necessary We will provide statements from incarcerated individuals, addresses, stamps, and envelopes. We got you, come write with us familia.

Colectivo de Solidaridad de San Francisco
 Noche de Escritura de Cartas y Correspondencias.
 Nuestro enfoque está en el trabajo abolicionista de las prisiones,
centrado en la lucha de las personas en prisiones, cárceles y centros
de detención juvenil y de inmigrantes a nivel local y mundial. Únase con nosotros para intercambiar cartas, iniciar amistades por correspondencia o simplemente escribir tarjetas de cumpleaños. No es necesario comprometerse. Nosotros proveeremos declaraciones de las personas encarceladas, direcciones, sellos y sobres.
¡Estamos para ti! Vengan a escribir con nosotros familia!

No Kings! No Queens! is the super-chill community chess club that gathers the 1st Sunday of every month in the galeria. Hosted by Danny Cao, all ages and skill levels are encouraged to come. Never played chess? We'll teach you! Come hang out, talk chess and play a few games.

Art show and screening of the short film Mi Tesoro by Milani Medina.

Mi Tesoro is a film that explores the treasures of the human soul. What began as a simple question to overcome a language barrier turned into a journey to reveal the gold residing in people’s hearts, minds, and lives. 

There will be two screenings of the film at 7pm and 8pm. The pop up art show will be up until 10pm. Participants include;

@belowsycamore
@elygoat
@_embriiz
@_blackwell @swapfilm.co
@zlickkids
@isonn._
@jdma.sf
@mil4ni.mp4
DJ:
@nick.derenzi

Other Dimensions in Sound is our Friday music series curated and hosted by Boohaabian multi reed player extraordinare David Boyce. Each week David will be inviting different musical guests to join him in our galeria for a night of sonic sustenance.

Tonight’s sonic sustenance is being provided by Josh Berman(cornet) and Fred Lonberg-Holm(cello).

Fred Lonberg-Holm is a musician / free improviser / cellist  currently living in El Cerrito CA.   Recent collaborators include Farida Amadou, Michael Bisio,  Tomeka Reid, Simon Camatta, John Edwards, Ahmed El Mottassem, Helena Espvall, Frode Gjerstad, Mat Maneri, Joe McPhee,  Paal Nilssen-Love, Dave Rempis, Roscoe Mitchell and Ben Vida to name a few.
While mostly focusing on free improvising in “ad-hoc” situations, current ongoing projects include Ballister, Survival Unit III, Ear Scratcher, Camatta/Lonberg-Holm, Jakal, The Flying Cellos, the Lightbox Orchestra, Party Knullers and Stirrup.
As a session musician, he has contributed cello sounds to numerous recording projects including those of Califone, Freakwater, Kaki King, God-is-my-co-pilot, Simon Joyner, Smog, Super Chunk, US Maple, Wilco, Protomartyr, Ryley Walker and many others.
Past projects of note include the Peter Brotzmann Chicago Tentet, Vandermark 5, Anthony Coleman’s Selfhaters, Joelle Leandre’s Atlantic Septet, and his own Terminal 4 and the Valentine Trio.

Josh Berman is an internationally recognized cornetist and composer. He has led the acclaimed Old Idea, Josh Berman and his Gang, and his own trio. In addition to being an indispensable contributor to Chicago’s jazz and improvised music scene, Berman has been a concert presenter in Chicago, producing hundreds of shows over the past 20 years. Berman’s work has been critically acclaimed in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, JazzTimes, and DownBeat, among others. His recordings can be found on the Chicago’s legendary Delmark Records and more recently on Austin’s Astral Spirits Records.

Join Ruby authors Susanna Kwan (Awake in the Floating City, Pantheon Books) and Mia Ayumi Malhotra (Mothersalt, Alice James Books) for a reading in celebration of their new books, both released on May 13, 2025. 

Kwan’s debut novel imagines a future flooded San Francisco that, according to Meng Jin, “expands the known world, making room within its unbearable devastation for beauty, compassion, and love,” while Mothersalt, Malhotra’s second collection of poetry, “charts—astoundingly, wondrously—the vast territories of the unnarratable that constitute motherhood” (Jenny Xie). Both works, written side by side at The Ruby beginning in 2018, explore what it means to exist in a world unmoored from its bearings—bewildered, disbelieving, and yet fully awakened to what it means to be human. 

Following the reading, writer, producer, and oral historian Shanna Farrell will moderate a conversation between the two authors about caregiving and connection, imagined/disappearing worlds, creative community, and more.

Susanna Kwan is an artist and writer from San Francisco. Her work has been supported by fellowships from Kundiman, Storyknife, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, The Writers' Grotto, and Vanderbilt University. Awake in the Floating City is her first novel. She teaches writing with The Dream Side.

Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Mothersalt, the chapbook Notes from the Birth Year, and Isako Isako, a California Book Award finalist and winner of the Alice James Award, Nautilus Gold Award for Poetry, National Indie Excellence Award, and Maine Literary Award. Her work has received the Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry and the Singapore Poetry Prize, and she is a Kundiman Fellow and founding member of The Ruby SF. Currently she teaches poetry at Left Margin LIT and is working on a new book about music and the interior life.

Shanna Farrell is an interviewer at UC Berkeley's Oral History Center, where she works on a wide variety of projects and specializes in arts and cultural, food and beverage, and environmental history. She is the author of A Good Drink: In Pursuit of Sustainable Spirits and Bay Area Cocktails: A History of Culture, Community and Craft. She is currently working on a book about fertility. 

San Francisco Solidarity Collective hosts Letter Writing and Correspondence Night

Our focus is on prison abolitionist work centered on the struggle of people in prison, jails, and immigrant and juvenile detention centers locally and worldwide. Join us for exchanging letters, starting a pen-pal, or just one-time birthday cards. No commitment necessary We will provide statements from incarcerated individuals, addresses, stamps, and envelopes. We got you, come write with us familia.

Colectivo de Solidaridad de San Francisco
 Noche de Escritura de Cartas y Correspondencias.
 Nuestro enfoque está en el trabajo abolicionista de las prisiones,
centrado en la lucha de las personas en prisiones, cárceles y centros
de detención juvenil y de inmigrantes a nivel local y mundial. Únase con nosotros para intercambiar cartas, iniciar amistades por correspondencia o simplemente escribir tarjetas de cumpleaños. No es necesario comprometerse. Nosotros proveeremos declaraciones de las personas encarceladas, direcciones, sellos y sobres.
¡Estamos para ti! Vengan a escribir con nosotros familia!

Join Bay Area poets in solidarity with Gaza featuring Paul Flores, Vanessa Torres and more TBA

!PALESTINE IS THE NAME OF ALL THE PEOPLES OF THE EARTH!

Humanity is burning in the flames of war. In Gaza, the tender bodies of children are consumed daily by relentless Zionist bombardments. The mobilization of civil society and the hesitant declarations of politicians rejecting this brutal invasion are not enough to contain the catastrophe. We are all Palestinians today — the childhood of the world is being exterminated in a beautiful and beloved land. The roots that bind us to the earth are being severed.

We are poets, and our only instrument of defense for tortured life is language. We will use it fully, launching a vast poetic action across the world to denounce the machinery of annihilation deployed by the pale murderers. Life is sacred; no one has the right to extinguish it. Palestinian land is sacred; no occupying force has the right to seize it. The martyrs are sacred; their red blood spilled on green grass will nourish and raise the soul of the world.

The World Poetry Movement (WPM) calls upon all human beings of deep conscience and burning heart — poets, artists, and thinkers around the planet — to rise in solidarity. We urge demonstrations in every country, by every possible means, on May 15, 2025, marking the 77th anniversary of the Nakba, the day when 700,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes.

We also call for global actions on 28-29 June 2025, with massive poetry readings, performances, conferences, talks, concerts, and exhibitions — in public spaces and in private venues. We encourage workshops and discussions in schools and colleges, in cities and villages around the world, to share and spread Palestinian poetry of resistance.

We know that writing and reading poems alone will not be enough to end the war in Gaza or halt the extermination. Yet it will form part of a worldwide poetic revolution — one that can awaken the confused spirit of our species and return us to our deepest humanity, marching firmly toward the realization of true peace on earth, in profound unity, and the recovery of humanity’s forgotten greatest hopes.

More info at https://worldpoetrymovement.org/palestine-is-the-name-of-all-the-peoples-of-the-earth/