Mother/Earth is a reading and visual arts exhibition that explores the divine feminine, particularly mother and earth goddesses, and the artists' personal connection to spirituality, the earth and the divine mother. featuring Barbara Jane Reyes, Lourdes Figueroa, Ahimsa Timoteo Bolton, Sandra Maria Calvo and Michelle Marie Robles Wallace.
Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003), Poeta en San Francisco (TinFish Press, 2005), Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010), To Love as Aswang (Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc., 2015), Invocation to Daughters (City Lights Publishing, 2017), Letters to a Young Brown Girl (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2020), and Wanna Peek Into My Notebook?: Notes on Pinay Liminality (Paloma Press, 2022). Daughtersong Diaspore is forthcoming in 2027. She is also the author of three chapbooks, For the City That Nearly Broke Me (Aztlan Libre Press, 2012), Cherry (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2007), and Easter Sunday (Ypolita Press, 2007).
Poems and essays have appeared in Asian American Literary Review, Asian Pacific American Journal, Chain, Hambone, Huizache, Maganda, Marías at Sampaguitas, Meridians, Ms. Magazine, New American Writing, New England Review, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, San Francisco Chronicle, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, South Dakota Review, Southern Humanities Review, The New York Times, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. An Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow, a recipient of the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, the Global Filipino Literary Award, and a San Francisco Press Club Journalism Award, she received her BA in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, her MFA at San Francisco State University, and she teaches in the Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program at University of San Francisco. She has taught in the MFA programs at Mills College and University of San Francisco. She lives with her husband, poet and educator Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland.
Lourdes Figueroa is a queer chicanx oral poet & poetry filmmaker whose work reflects their family’s experiences in el azadón— tilling the soil under the sun, in Yolo County. Based in the Bay Area, they have served as a family case manager, domestic violence advocate, housing advocate, interpreter, translator, and community organizer. Lourdes is the author of the chapbooks yolotl, Ruidos = To Learn Speak, and Vuelta (Nomadic Press) and most recently with La Universidad Autónoma De Nuevo León with their long verse poem I will kiss your mouth b/w the overgrown Milpa. They are a recipient of Nomadic Press Bay Area Literature Award for Poetry. Discover her latest poems in the Mexican journal Tierra Adentro & latest poetry 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.
Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán is a multimedia artist, activist/organizer, and educator. An NEA and Tulsa Artist Fellow, they are the author of the chapbooks, Archipiélagos; Inquillry; Antes y después del Bronx: Lenapehoking; and South Bronx Breathing Lessons; editor of the international queer/transIndigenous issue of Yellow Medicine Review; and co-editor of the Native dance/movement/performance issue of Movement Research Performance Journal. Working with diverse communities to create multimedia dance events, their visual art, videos, writing, and performances have been shared internationally. Bodhrán organized an international womanist/queer/trans Indigenous roundtable dialogue on issues of water for Hawai'i Review. A founding co-organizer of the world's first transgender film festival, which became the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival, they organized the world's first transgender Arab roundtable dialogue for Sinister Wisdom.
Sandy Calvo. Originally from Costa Rica and speaking no English, Sandy Calvo was brought to
California at the age of seven, along with her seven siblings by her parents seeking a
better future. After graduating from Verdugo Hills High School, Sandy attended
Occidental College where she received a Bachelor of Arts in English. Sandy holds
Master of Education degrees from both Stanford University and Mills College. Recently
retired from a career as an English teacher and secondary school administrator, and as a writer-poet, Sandy is the author of a chapbook, Prayer to Myself (1995), and her
poem, Mexico City, Summer 1990, was published in A La Brava (1996), a Queer ‘zine
edited by Jaime Cortez. Her poem, Snakes was included in The Yellow Medicine
Review-International Queer Indigenous Voices, edited by Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhran
(Fall 2010). An early poem written as a college student was published in the College
Poetry Review (1976). A short essay, entitled Pandoura’s Box: A Tribute to Pandoura
Carpenter appeared in The Art Issue of Sinister Wisdom #73, edited by Fran Day
(2008). Sandy was an original member of the Indigena as Scribe writing group with
Cherrie Moraga and was the co-founder of Teachers as Writers with Marty Williams for
the Bay Area Writing Project. Sandy was a resident writer during the summer of 1994 atcHedgebrook Farm on Whitbey Island in the Pacific Northwest. In relation to her own visual art, Sandy has had the sense that it has been created and kept mostly private; even so, there has been public recognition and exhibitions of her art. In April of 2024 and April of 2025 Sandy participated as a guest artist at Project Artaud through the Open Studios with Mission Artists United where she exhibited her artwork and was a primary reader at two poetry readings. As a member of the former Bay Area’s LVA (Lesbian Visual Artists) several slides of Sandy’s art were included in the permanent LGBTQ Art Archives at Brown University. The collage Touching the Rock Woman, appeared as the cover of Breakthrough, the political journal of Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (Spring,1993). A collage, A La Carrera-On the Run, was included in We’Moon Calendar (1996). Also, during the 1990’s, several of Sandy’s
original pieces were exhibited in San Francisco at Lyon-Martin Clinic. Several works
were shown at the Mission Cultural Center as a part of group shows for the Queer
Latino/a Arts Festival, curated by the late Hank Tavera for the Queer Latino/a Artist
Coalition (1997/1998). In the 1990’s Sandy co-founded an art business, La Sala
Studios, with her ex -partner, Sarita Johnson. At the La Sala Studio shows, held at theirvhome in Oakland, Sandy exhibited and sold originals, prints, and greeting cards of hervartwork. Sandy regrets not documenting these showings of her art more carefully having understood them as “informal sharings” among friends and family and not as formal acknowledgments and interest in her visual art.
Michelle Marie Robles Wallace is a writer and painter. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, is a winner of two San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant, a Janavi Held Artist grant, a San Francisco Writers' Grotto Writing Fellowship , and finalist in Somos en escrito's Extra-Fiction Contest. She is an alum of The Community of Writers, Voices of Our Nation and Parakeet. Michelle was a reader/assistant at The Kimberly Cameron Literary Agency, founder and host of the Borderlands Lectura series and The Kaleidoscope Reading Series. She is a member of at Louis Place and the San Francisco Writers' Grotto.
Michelle has published short fiction, CNF and journalism in Alpinist, Vice, The San Francisco Chronicle, Narratively, Catapult, Remezcla, Complex, The Rumpus, The Tico Times, Yoga Journal, Pilates Style Magazine, Mountain Project, KCET, Women Arts Blog, Sun Song and From Sac, among others. Motherhood has broken open Michelle’s creativity in ways she never could have imagined. She began painting in the middle of the night during those early days when 3 am and 3 pm felt interchangeable. She is, among other projects, writing down the stories she tells her daughter at night, stories that outline a mythical, magical world that has sprung up because of her daughter.