Conjuring Poetic Words as Medicine for Nightmares is a two part event organized by the Culture Counts Reading Series of San José, CA. The first part is a poetry writing workshop from 4:30p-6p. The second is a poetry reading from 7p-9p. This event is free and open to the public. 

Poetry readins from Sara Borjas, soledad con carne,Josiah Luis Alderete, and our featured poet Annie Abundiz.

BIOS;

SARA BORJAS is a Xicanx pocha and a Fresno poet. Her debut collection of poetry, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff was published by Noemi Press in 2019. Sara was named one of Poets & Writers 2019 Debut Poets, is a 2017 CantoMundo Fellow, and the recipient of a 2020 American Book Award. She teaches innovative undergraduates at UC Riverside, lives in Los Angeles, and stays rooted in Fresno. Find her @saraborhaz or at www.saraborjas.com.

soledad con carne is a casually queer, intergalactic Oakland/Ohlone-based chicanx punk poet, working/poor multiple high school drop-out bookstore lackey, poet laureate of the San Fernando Valley, and blatant smoker sharing-trauma-with-their-mother.

Josiah Luis Alderete is a full blooded Spanglish speaking Pocho y left handed callejero de Aztlán who has been part of La Area Bahia’s spoken word scene for over twenty years. He is the curator and host of the long running Latinx reading series Speaking Axolotl and  is the author of two books of poetry “Baby Axolotls & Old Pochos(Black Freighter Press 2021) and the chapbook “Fuchi Faces de los Estados Jodidos”(For The Pueblo 2023). In 2023 he was the Poetry Center’s Mazza Writer in Residence at San Francisco State.  Along with his bookstore sister Tân Khanh Cao, Josiah  tends the portal known as Medicina Para Pesadillas Bookstore y Galeria on 24th street in La Mission.

Annie Abundiz is a Chicana poet raised by the communities of east side San Jose and San Juan del Monte, Jalisco. She is a San Jose State University alumnus with a B.A. in Chicanx Studies, dedicated to abolitionist and decolonial education. Her work has been inspired by educators in XITO (Xicanx Institute for Teaching and Organizing), an Intercambio with teachers of color and Zapatistas in Chiapas, and storytellers within her immigrant family. Their recent work includes collaborating with UTRGV as an ethnic studies consultant and working as a kindergarten teacher in east side San Jose. She is currently part of the Culture Counts Reading Series, a poetic space for engaging youth in story-circles, writing, and social justice needs.

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 and Carnatic vocalist/violinist Krishna Parthasarathy, this gathering focuses on curating 4 short live sets that represent different influences and traditions. Our goal is to connect, build our raga music loving community and share South Asian classical music in an impromptu, casual and attentive setting.

Minimum $10 suggested donation with all money going to the musicians.

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.

Four poets gather for an IRL good old fashioned book reading. Featuring Karla Brundage, Ashia Ajani, Kevin Dublin, and Arthur Kayzakian

Karla Brundage is an Oakland poet, editor, essayist and beach lover. A recipient of a Fulbright Teacher Exchange she spent a year teaching in Zimbabwe and three years in Côte d'Ivoire where she founded West Oakland to West Africa Poetry Exchange. Her books Swallowing Watermelons and Mulatta-Not So Tragic (co-written with Allison Francis) reflect on mixed race identity, single parenting, and living with epilepsy. In 2020, her poem Alabama Dirt was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has performed her work onstage and online, and has published both nationally and internationally. Her work can be found at https://www.karlabrundage.com/. Her forthcoming book Blood Lies:Race Trait(or) is out in February and available at Finishing Line Press .

Ashia Ajani is a sunshower, a glass bead, a carnivorous plant, an overripe nectarine hailing from Denver, CO, Queen City of the Plains and the unceded territory of the Cheyenne, Ute, and Arapahoe peoples, now living in the Bay Area (unceded Ohlone land). Ajani is a lecturer in the AfAm Department at UC Berkeley and a climate resilient schools educator with Mycelium Youth Network. A BSF Award recipient, Ajani has received fellowships from Just Buffalo Literary Center, Tin House, The Watering Hole, UC Berkeley’s P4P Climate Activism Residency and the Milkweed Hub Chrysalis Institute. Their words have appeared in Sierra, Atmos, World Literature Today, Apogee Journal & Frontier Poetry, among others. Ajani is co-poetry editor of the Hopper Literary Magazine and Fall 2023 Poet in Residence at SF Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD). Ajani’s writing is a kaleidoscope of their work as an eco-griot and abolitionist. Their debut poetry collection, Heirloom (Write Bloody Publishing), is out now.

Kevin Dublin is an educator, economic justice advocate, and the author of Eulogy (Raven & Wren Press, 2023) and How to Fall in Love in San Diego (Finishing Line Press, 2017). He is the recipient of grants, fellowships, and awards from the SF Dream Keeper Initiative, San Francisco Arts Commission, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Center for Cultural Innovation, and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. His work has recently appeared or forthcoming in Ploughshares, Konch, Apocrypha Magazine, The San Franciscan, Cincinnati Review, and several international poetry anthologies. He is the founder and director of The Living Room SF. Kevin believes in you and our collective power to change the world.

Arthur Kayzakian is the winner of the 2021 inaugural Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series for his collection, The Book of Redacted Paintings, which was also selected as a finalist for the 2021 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. He is the recipient of the 2023 creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is also the winner of the PS Straosse award for poems in Prairie Schooner and winner of the Open Chapbook Competition for his chapbook, My Burning City. He serves as the Poetry Chair for the International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA). His work has appeared in several publications, including The Adroit Journal, Portland Review, Chicago Review, Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Witness Magazine.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary joins us to discuss his new book The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World. Ajay will be joined in conversation with Daniel Aldana Cohen.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary is the executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a core faculty member specializing in social and political theory. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics. His research focuses on social and political theory, Frankfurt School critical theory, political economy, political ecology, media, religion, and post-colonial studies. He has written for The Guardian, The Nation, The Baffler, n+1, Los Angeles Review of Books, Quartz, Social Text, Dialectical Anthropology, The Hedgehog Review, Filmmaker Magazine, and 3quarksdaily, among other venues. Ajay’s book on the politics of climate change, The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World, is forthcoming from Repeater Books in February, 2024.

Daniel Aldana Cohen is Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, where he directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2. He's also Founding Co-Director of the Climate and Community Project. He's the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019).

Join us as we celebrate the release of Deep Vellum’s “Best Literary Translations 2024”.

The first U.S. anthology celebrating the breadth of literary translators’ work will be published on April 9, 2024. Best Literary Translations is a new annual featuring the year’s best poetry, short fiction, and essay, drawn from U.S.-affiliated literary journals and magazines.

Best Literary Translations 2024, the anthology’s inaugural volume, features both contemporary and historical poetry and prose originally written in nineteen languages – including some not commonly seen in U.S. translations, such as Burmese, Kurdish, Tigrinya, and Wayuu – brought into English by thirty-eight of the most talented translators working today. These poems, short stories, essays, and hybrid works were drawn from more than 500 nominated works published in U.S. literary journals during 2022, spanning more than eighty countries and nearly sixty languages.

Three translators selected by the guest editor, Jane Hirshfield, will read their work and discuss the art of translation.

Bios:

Dmitri Manin is a physicist, programmer, and poetry translator. His translations from English and French into Russian have appeared in several book collections. Among his latest work are a complete translation of Ted Hughes’s Crow and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems into Russian. Dmitri’s Russian-to-English translations have been published in journals (Cardinal Points, Delos, The Café Review, Metamorphoses, et al), in Maria Stepanova’s The Voice Over (CUP, 2021) and in the anthology Disbelief: 100 Russian Anti-War Poems (Smokestack Books, 2023). In 2017, Dmitri won the Compass Award competition. His translation of N. Zabolotsky’s landmark collection Columns came out in 2023 from Arc Publications.

Eirill Alvilde Falck is a Norwegian-born writer and translator who lives in the United States. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review and Poetry Magazine. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she was later a Zell Fellow. She was a 2020-2022 Iowa Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa, where she completed a master’s degree in Literary Translation. While at the University of Iowa, she received the Stanley Award for International Research, for her work on translations of Edvard Munch’s journals. She is the recipient of the John Wagner Prize and the Hopwood Award, and has received support from the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, the Clarion Foundation, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Eirill is the co-founder of MQR: Mixtape, an imprint of Michigan Quarterly Review.  

Armen Davoudian is the author of the poetry collection The Palace of Forty Pillars (Tin House) and the translator, from Persian, of Hopscotch by Fatemeh Shams (Ugly Duckling Presse). He grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.

Boohaabian multi reed player extraordinare David Boyce continues his semi regular Friday residency tonight. Each week David will be inviting different musical guests to join him in our galeria for a night of sonic sustenance and musical medicina.

Tonight’s sonic sustenance is being provided by Matias Arizmedi and Mystery School(Philip Greenlief and David Boyce)

Speaking Axolotl La Area Bahia’s long running monthly Latinx reading series happens the third Thursday of each month. Come gather and hear Decolonized Verses, Spanglish Poesia, Bilingual Chismes y Latinx Spoken Word.

!This month we are over la luna excited to have as our features Xavi Burgos and Elvira Prieto!

BIOS;

Xavi Burgos is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, organizer, and educator from New York City and Chicago, currently completing a PhD in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Elvira Prieto, Associate Dean of Students and Director of El Centro Chicano y Latino at Stanford University, was born and raised in California’s Central San Joaquin Valley working alongside her parents and siblings in the grape fields and fruit packing sheds of Reedley, CA and surrounding communities in Fresno County. She is the first woman in her family to attend college, receiving her B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University and an Ed.M. in Administration, Planning and Social Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Elvira has worked in higher education, student affairs, academic advising, policy analysis and implementation, and community-based education for almost 30 years. Elvira is a writer and poet who self-published a memoir-style manuscript about her journey: "An (Im)possible Life." Elvira began writing poetry and prose 25+ years ago, due in large part to the encouragement and mentorship of her dear friend and teacher, Renato I. Rosaldo, Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, Emeritus at Stanford University. Her writing is focused on the retelling of life recuerdos (memories) with the intention of creating spaces of light, love, and healing for individuals and community. Elvira has presented her poetry and prose in various community and academic settings such as floricantos, classrooms, conferences, and community events hosted across the country, including UT Austin, Stanford, USF, and SJSU.

The Last Supper Party is a spoken word and performance series inspired by Fe Bongolan’s landmark painting of the same name; a 200 sq. ft. canvas that defines our Sutter Street office and live arts venue.
The Last Supper Party presents the voices of diverse artists and writers who call out the myriad injustices and impacts of corruption, unchecked power and greed.
We invite our audience to share ideas and bread and find inspiration in the thoughts and words of artists whose perspectives are drawn from a kaleidoscope of cultures. But who are united by compassion and a common desire to seek justice, equity and truth. Tonight’s features are Ryan Nakano, Lia Le-Nguyen, Katherine Park.

The Last Supper Party is curated by Kimi Sugioka and is part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival(SFIAF).

Ryan Nakano
Ryan Nakano is an Okinawan/Japanese American poet and journalist living in Huchiun, on the unceded lands of the Lisjan Ohlone (Oakland, CA) with his wonderful partner and cat. His poems have been published in Riksha Magazine as well as Voicemail Poems. His debut chapbook, I Am Minor came out in February 2023 initially published by Nomadic Press. The book is currently available through Black Lawrence Press.

Lia Le-Nguyen
Lia Le-Nguyen is a writer based in Fremont, California. In 2023, Lia was on the shortlist for Youth Poet Laureate of Alameda County. She has been a writer ever since she made homemade hardcovers out of cardboard in the first grade. Lia believes in the power of poetry to enact social change.

Katherine Park
Bi-racial Korean/Scottish/Irish/Welsh/British American singer and actor, Katherine Park grew up near Boston, Massachusetts eating blueberries with chopsticks and drinking hot chocolate for breakfast. She cut her teeth as lead singer of indie bands before releasing her solo EP Sonatine Dream and joining Pandan Leaf Collective. Photo of Katherine by Douglas Despres.

Kimi Sugioka (Curator)
Kimi Sugioka is a poet, songwriter, and educator. She is the current Poet Laureate for the City of Alameda, a post that includes creating platforms for the presentation of a diverse variety of poets and spoken-word artists. Kimi also performs her own work frequently throughout the Bay Area. Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and raised in Berkeley, California, Kimi has worked in public education for decades, and earned her BA from San Francisco State University and MFA from the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

UPDATES on Gaza genocide cases at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and in U.S federal court

PLEASE JOIN US with special guest Terry Valen from the International Migrants Alliance (IMA), plus report-back by Vann Jones and others from People's Tribunal in Castro Valley organized by East Bay 4 Ceasefire seeking to hold Rep. Eric Swalwell accountable for his complicity in ongoing genocide in Gaza and Palestine, see: https://eastbay4ceasefire.org/tribunal/

Featuring additional invited guests from Palestinian Youth Movement, Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), Haiti Action Committee, International Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP), Myanmar Student Union, and Chiapas Support Committee

Sponsored by: National Lawyers Guild-San Francisco Bay Area (NLG-SFBA) chapter

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 us this afternoon for an artist talk with Jeanelle Bantique and Anthony Jiminez, whose solo art show “Crossing Paths” is currently on exhibit in our galeria.

Crossing Paths, is an interactive painting, with portraits of people in the community who have had a profound effect on me, showing the value they bring to public spaces by celebrating them. I am welcoming the public to interact and add to the mural (by painting, writing, drawing, collaging) with one question “Who here has had an impact on you?” Write, draw, paint about that individual, at any skill level. Reflect on how they changed you or your life. Talk to them or invite them in. Allow this mural to unify us as we pause to appreciate our community and family. The goal of this project is to teach critically, honor and love others, form bonds, and allow the public to communicate ideas and feelings through artmaking to bring us closer, in a time where many feel divided and alone. Amongst these portraits are immigrant/migrant leaders, POC leaders, female leaders, LGBTQ leaders, cultural bearers, practitioners, disrupters; the diverse faces who are the makeup of our lives, who are challenging norms by leading us to a brighter future.

The space between these portraits is available for the public to interact with, by adding stories about those who have impacted them, through drawing, painting, writing and collaging onto the wall. The final product will include your mark on the painting, the way we all leave a mark on the community.

Anthony Jimenez Artist Statement

I am a first generation Latinx muralist and educator, with a B.A. in Visual and Public Art, residing in San Francisco CA. My other mediums include acrylic on canvas, illustration, and digital painting/illustration. I use my art to engage and educate the public by creating dialogue about social issues, and vulnerability — exploring themes of politics, self-reflection, & imagination. I steer my artwork towards reciprocity with the community, using it as a vessel for change. With portraiture, I honor those who have come before us, celebrating our diversity, heritage and roots so that we may be empowered and seen. I have participated in a Last Chance Mercantile Residency and Sunbeam arts residency, and was awarded the 2023 Individual Artist Grant from SFAC

From the organizing body that brings you the Berkeley Slam and the Oakland Slam, RichOak Events presents a new poetry show in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District. In partnership with Medicine for Nightmares, the Day Dreamer’s Poetry Showcase is a spoken word event where voices that have often been silenced or overlooked have a chance to shine.

Join us every 2nd Saturday in the Galleria as we invite local and traveling poets to shape and nurture the very dreams we as poets refuse to let die.

Every month, we will be bringing featuring poets from all walks of life to inspire our audience with beauty of story telling and the alchemy of word play. This month’s feature is Ciera Jevae.

BIO

Oakland-born, Richmond raised, Ciera Jevae serves her community as an artist-educator, healer, writer, editor, activist, community advocate, and scholar. She is the published author of her collection of poems, Unto Ivy’s Rib, as well as the author of two chapbooks, Testimonies of Richmond, and Incarcerated Words. She obained her B.A. in Sociology and her MFA in Writing. Her work highlights the intersectionality of Black girls, women, and the incarcerated community while centering joy, self-discovery, and healing.

Boohaabian multi reed player extraordinare David Boyce continues his regular Friday residency tonight. Each week David will be inviting different musical guests to join him in our galeria for a night of sonic sustenance and musical medicina.

Tonight Other Dimesnions in Sound welcomes “Ark Of Bones”(Boyce-reeds/Evans-cello y electronics/Ficarra-flute y sound design)

Join us for a very special evening with Mohamed Abdou  author of “Islam & Anarchism”

Drawing on the transnational historical, material, spiritual and symbolic of 1492 in Andalusia and the Columbia Conquistador invasion of the Americas, this book talk will discuss the relevance of Islam to the struggle for Palestinian, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color liberation in the settler-colonial contexts of Zionist Israel and Crusading America and Canada. Through Islam and Anarchism, Abdou will address how discourses around Muslims and Islam all too often lapses into a false dichotomy of Orientalist and Fundamentalist tropes. A popular reimagining of Islam is urgently needed. Yet it is a perhaps an unexpected political philosophical tradition that has the most to offer in this pursuit: anarchism. Islam and Anarchism simultaneously disrupts two commonly held beliefs - that Islam is necessarily authoritarian and capitalist; and that anarchism is necessarily anti-religious and anti-spiritual. Deeply rooted in key Islamic-Quranic concepts and textual sources, and drawing on radical Indigenous, Black, and Islamic anarchistic and social movement discourses, Abdou proposes 'Anarcha-Islam'. In constructing a decolonial and abolitionist, non-authoritarian and non-capitalist Islamic anarchism, Islam and Anarchism philosophically and theologically challenges the classist, sexist, racist, ageist, queerphobic and ableist inequalities in both post- and neo-colonial societies like Egypt, and settler-colonial societies such as Canada and the USA. Abdou will address how what we are witnessing in Palestine and Turtle Island is an ongoing Religious-Racial War and the contemporary movement links between the Arab Spring's Tahrir Uprisings, 'Occupy Wallstreet', No Dakota Pipelines (NoDapl), Black Lives Matter, and the real-time unfolding of a genocide in Gaza.

Dr. Mohamed Abdou is a North African-Egyptian Muslim anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race, and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, abolition, and decolonization with extensive fieldwork experience in the Middle East-North Africa, Asia, and Turtle Island. He is currently the Arcapita Visiting Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. He is a former Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University of Cairo and recently completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University. He has taught many courses on various topics at the University of Toronto and Queen's University including on Indigenous Land Education & Black Geographies. His research stems from his involvement with the anti-globalization post-Seattle 1999 movements, organizing for Palestinian liberation, the Tyendinaga Mohawks and the sister territories of Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Kanehsatake, during the standoff over the Culbertson tract, as well as the anti-war protests of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Indigenous Zapatista movement in Chiapas, and the 2011 Egyptian uprisings. He is author of Islam & Anarchism: Relationships & Resonances (Pluto Press, 2022). He wrote his transnational ethnographic and historical-archival PhD dissertation on Islam & Queer-Muslims: Identity & Sexuality in the Contemporary (2019).

We have already been through the horrors of a Third World War. Today we are in the Fourth. To better understand this moment, we turn to theory from below from those who know about war: our Maya elders, the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, the EZLN.

Join us for a talk with Linda Quiquivix. co-editor and translator and author of the upcoming Palestine 1492.

No Kings! No Queens! is the super-chill community chess club that gathers the 1st Sunday of every month in the galeria. Co-hosted by Chanaye and 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.

FAMILIA come celebrate La Mission’s favorite pinche panadero with a night of musica, chisme, y chistes as we pay homage to the strange 24th street entity known as “Louie”. Featuring loving roasts y tributes from Josiah Luis Alderete, Amanda Ayala, Ricardo Tavarez, and Marisol Cadena. Musica providing by Mr 45r.p.m himself Velez. I assure you Love and Locura will ensue.

Boohaabian multi reed player extraordinare David Boyce continues his semi regular Friday residency tonight. Each week David will be inviting different musical guests to join him in our galeria for a night of sonic sustenance and musical medicina.

Tonight musical medicina will be provided by God/Emperor/Doom(Karl Evangelista/Jordan Glen/David Boyce)

Nostalgic for nothing cinema is back with a screening of the newly restored 1983 documentary by St. Clair Bourne, The Black and the Green in which a delegation of Black Liberation activists from the US visit Northern Irish Resistance organizers in Belfast in December 1981.

Shot just a few months after the martyrdom of IRA revolutionary Bobby Sands, The Black and The Green is comprised of organizing meeting, speak outs, interviews and candid footage all thinking through the complexities of solidarity between related but discrepant resistance movements. The organizers draw parallels between the Black Struggle in the US, the Irish Struggle for independence from colonial British/Unionist rule and partition, and the pre-Intifada Palestinian Resistance struggle among others. St. Claire Bourne made a vibrant oeuvre of black biopic documentaries about Alice Coltrane, Amiri Baraka, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes and generally practiced a formally distant mode of reportage where he rather his subjects do the speaking.

The Black and the Green / dir. St. Clair Bourne / 1983 / 48 mins

Doors: 6:30pm

Start: 7:00pm

Free

The Poetry Center welcomes Michael David Lukas and Maia Ipp, friends and fellow essayists and novelists, for a Prose at The Poetry Center evening. Lukas and Ipp will each read from their work then join in conversation with one another and their audience.

Maia Ipp is a writer of fiction and cultural criticism. Since 2014, she's visited and occasionally lived in Central and Eastern Europe, including a year in Krakow on a writing fellowship from the Polish Ministry of Culture and several long stints in Berlin. She was one of the editors who relaunched the historic leftist magazine Jewish Currents in 2018, where she is now a contributing editor. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she held a De Alba fiction fellowship. She taught creative writing at the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts in San Francisco and spent six years at City Lights Books as a bookseller, editor, and occasional personal assistant to Lawrence Ferlinghetti. She is working on her first novel, SUGAR TRUCK. More here. 

Michael David Lukas has been a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, a night-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv, a student at the American University of Cairo, and a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. Translated into more than a dozen languages, his first novel The Oracle of Stamboul was a finalist for the California Book Award, the NCIBA Book of the Year Award, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize. His second novel, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, won the Sami Rohr Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, the Prix Interallié for Foreign Fiction, and the ALA’s Sophie Brody Medal. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Maryland, he is a recipient of scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, New York State Summer Writers’ Institute, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and Elizabeth George Foundation. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Slate, National Geographic Traveler, and Georgia Review. He lives in Oakland and teaches at San Francisco State University. Photo by Irene Young.

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.

 Come celebrate with Yenia for her 2nd book launch with a night filled with performances, poetry, and solidarity!  

Particiapting poets;

Tongo Eisen-Martin, ThirtySFC,, Missnana, Moe ministry, Ceci, Random28, Pura Vida, Kevin madrigal, LSIETE, Cynthia, Mr45PM ,Delfa,AMK

Come join us to explore and understand the deep significance of the deeply rooted and spiritual Psoas muscle in your body and how it's health, function and resilience are vital to maintaining not only a healthy spine & hip function, but also nervous system balance. We will learn some techniques, exercises and practices to achieve and maintain optimal Psoas function, how it relates to the rest of the body, and can influence holistic/overall  well-being.

About the workshop: The Psoas is the main muscle that connects your torso and lower body. It’s a very unique part of our body because it aids us in a multitude of functions that contribute to our overall wellbeing. Physically, it stabilizes your lower spine and brings your leg up towards your torso, which is reflected in many daily activities (walking, picking something up from the floor, etc). But it also has a profound connection to our nervous system-our mental and emotional health. Cultivating a resilient Psoas can help us to regulate our flight/fight/freeze response, and support our overall wellbeing, as well as recovery from injury and traumatic events

BIO and INFO;

Olivia studied different rehabilitation modalities intensively as a means to heal, rebuild, and reconnect from the inside out. She is extremely grateful and can attest to the healing benefits from her firsthand experience. She combines elements of Pilates, Neurokinetic therapy, breathwork, fascial release, physical therapy and more in her work to help others. Olivia holds a comprehensive certification through STOTT Pilates and has been teaching since 2013. She has experience and compassion for working with all age ranges, levels, and especially those with injuries. She specializes in rehabilitation especially with the spine and Psoas.

Veggie Mijas Biography:Veggie Mijas is a women of color collective, in which we highlight the importance of having a plant-based lifestyle while also intersecting race, gender identity, class, and sexuality; being brown, Latinx, non-binary, women, queer, genderqueer, coming from a working class background, and having other marginalized identities. We are very passionate about spreading awareness of the lack of resources we have to healthier options in the hood, animal liberation, environmental justice. This is a platform where womxn/folks have shared their families recipes, their own recipes, and have talked about why being vegan has connected them to their ancestral roots.

Our Mission

To create sacred spaces for folks where they can share their experiences with food or having a plant-based diet through a intersectional lens. Veggie Mijas has a national collective list where folks can share their information, know about events happening in their city, and meet other vegan folks of color in their community. Therefore, our main focus is sharing space, relearning ancestral practices through foods, share our plant-based recipes, and provide access to information our community needs. This is done through organizing events such as potlucks, vegan panels, farm sanctuary trips, yoga sessions, learning how to plant herbs, and much more. Lastly, our goal is to show folks that decolonizing your diet is possible.

Boohaabian multi reed player extraordinare David Boyce continues his regular Friday residency tonight. Each week David will be inviting different musical guests to join him in our galeria for a night of sonic sustenance and musical medicina.

Tonight David guests are the Ben Davis Kanoko Nishi Duo

Valerie Werder will be reading from her new novel Thieves, and David Buuck will be reading from his works as Bay Area publisher, writer, and poet.  More to be announced.

Valerie Werder is a fiction writer, recovering art worker, and doctoral candidate in film and visual studies at Harvard University. Her writing has been published in Public Culture, BOMB, and Flash Art, and performed at Participant Inc, New York, and Artspace New Haven. Werder is a 2023-23 PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Program Mentor. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts with a black cat and hundreds of books.

David Buuck lives in Oakland, CA. He is the co-founder and editor of Tripwire, a journal of poetics and founder of BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics. Recent books include Noise in the Face of (Roof Books, 2016), SITE CITE CITY (Futurepoem, 2015), An Army of Lovers, co-written with Juliana Spahr (City Lights, 2013), and the chapbook The Riotous Outside (Commune Editions, 2018). He teaches at Mills College, where he is the chief steward of the adjunct faculty union, and at San Quentin’s Prison University Program, and is the Academic Director of the Clemente Course in the Humanities at Oakland Adult Career Education.

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 and Carnatic vocalist/violinist Krishna Parthasarathy, this gathering focuses on curating 4 short live sets that represent different influences and traditions. Our goal is to connect, build our raga music loving community and share South Asian classical music in an impromptu, casual and attentive setting. This month’s gathering features: Arvin Sundararajan vox, Mallar, Bhattacharya sarod, Swapan Gandhi bansuri, Sanjeev Palamand percussion.

Minimum $10 suggested donation with all money going to the musicians.

Indian Classical Sessions are a Rootstock Arts project (www.rootstockarts.com), a 501c3 California Arts Org contact: sameer@rootstockarts.com

animals & giraffes celebrates the release of live @ medicine for nightmares (Evander Music, 2023) with a concert featuring Kyle Bruckmann and Alexandra Buschman-Román, whoappear on the album; and special guests Chris Cooper, Tom Djll, Danishta Rivero, and Zachary James Watkins. Musician/composer Phillip Greenlief and writer Claudia La Rocco created animals & giraffes after meeting at Headlands Center for the Arts during their 2013 residencies. A never changing ensemble dedicated to interdisciplinary improvisation, a&g has performed at such venues as The Lab (SF), Pieter (LA), Reed College (Portland), Amalgam Presents at Café Mustache (Chicago), and the Chocolate Factory Theater (NYC). In 2017-2018, a&g was ensemble in residence at the Center for New Music, hosting monthly happy hours with musicians, visual artists, writers, and dancers. The group has three albums: July (Edgetone Records, 2017), featuring a who’s who of Bay Area improvisers; Landlocked Beach(Creative Sources, 2018), a live broadcast with Jon Leidecker on Over the Edge at KPFA FM; and animals & giraffes live @ medicine for nightmares (Evander Music, 2023), with Kyle Bruckmann, Alexandra Buschman-Román, and Adriana Camacho.

Since his emergence on the west coast in the late 1970s, saxophonist/composer PhillipGreenlief (b. 1959, Los Angeles) has achieved international acclaim for his recordings and performances with musicians and composers in the post-jazz continuum as well as new music innovators and virtuosic improvisers. He has performed with Wadada Leo Smith, Meredith Monk, Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener, and They Might Be Giants. Albums include two LANTSKAP LOGIC TRIO releases (w/ Evelyn Davis and Fred Frith), THAT OVERT DESIRE OF OBJECT with Joelle Leandre, ALL AT ONCE with FPR (Frank Gratkowski and Jon Raskin), and OH THAT MONSTER with LA punk pioneers Thelonious Monster. Recent residencies have included the Banff Center for Art and Creativity, Neue Muzik Koln, and Headlands Center for the Arts. His critical writing has been published in Artforum, Open Space (SFMOMA), Sound American, and Signal to Noise. Claudia La Rocco is the author of Drive By (Smooth Friend); Certain Things (Afternoon Editions); Quartet (Ugly Duckling Presse); The Best Most Useless Dress (Badlands Unlimited); and petit cadeau (published in print, digital, and live editions by The Chocolate Factory). She has received grants and residencies from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, Contemporary Art Stavanger, Headlands Center for the Arts, et al. She edited I Don’t Poem: An Anthology of Painters (Off the Park Press) and Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets, the catalogue for Danspace Projectʼs PLATFORM 2015, for which she was guest artist curator. La Rocco was a critic and reporter for The New York Times from 2005-2015, editorial director of Open Space from 2016-2021, and now edits The Back Room, a Small Press Traffic publishing program.