Reading series and open mic dedicated to the memory and spirit of poet Al Young. The features for this month are Leora Kava and Zeina Hashem Beck. Mask, proof of vac and booster will be required to atend this galeria event.

Leora (Lee) Kava is an Assistant Professor of Critical Pacific Islands & Oceania Studies, housed within the department of Race and Resistance Studies at SFSU. She is a poet and musician of Tongan descent, and the founder of the Pacific Verse project—a community-based workshop series based in Nukuʻalofa, Tonga that works with participants to create, perform, and publish original poetry and music. She has reviews of Pacific Islander poetry in Poetry Magazine and The Contemporary Pacific, and a short essay in Amerasia Journal. Her poetry can be found in Kore Press and The Hawaiʻi Review, with recordings available on podcasts It’s Lit with PhDJ (based in Honolulu) and For The Qultures (based in the Bay Area). She dedicates her work to her family, community, students, and the genealogies of creativity and liberation in Oceania.

Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her third full-length poetry collection, O, is forthcoming from Penguin Books in Summer 2022. Her collection Louder than Hearts won the 2016 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. She’s also the author of 3arabi Song, winner of the 2016 Rattle Chapbook prize, There Was and How Much There Was, a 2016 Laureate’s Choice selected by Carol Ann Duffy, and To Live in Autumn, winner of the 2013 Backwaters Prize. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Poetry, Ploughshares, World Literature Today, The Southeast Review, The Adroit Journal, Triquarterly, the Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Educated in Arabic, English, and French, Zeina has a BA and an MA in English Literature from the American University of Beirut. Zeina’s invented The Duet, a bilingual poetic form where English and Arabic exist separately and in relationship to each other. Her poem “Maqam” won Poetry Magazine’s 2017 Frederick Bock Prize. She’s the co-creator and co-host of Maqsouda, a podcast about Arabic poetry. After a lifetime in Lebanon and a decade in Dubai, Zeina recently moved to California.