Medicine for Nightmares is feliz to announce that a new monthly reading series has found its home in our galeria!
The Last Supper Party is a monthly poetry reading and open mic that will happen the 3rd Wednesday of every month. Hosted by Alameda poet laureate Kimi Sugioka.
This month’s features are : Genny Lim, MK Chavez and Nathaniel Vincent.
Genny Lim is San Francisco Jazz Poet Laureate emeritus. She is also the recipient of two life-time achievement awards from the City of Berkeley and PEN Oakland. Lim's award-winning play, Paper Angels, was the first Asian American play aired on PBS’s American Playhouse in 1985 and has been performed throughout the U.S., Canada and China. She is author of five poetry collections, Winter Place, Child of War, Paper Gods and Rebels, KRA!, La Morte Del Tempo, and co-author, along with the late Him Mark Lai and Judy Yung, of Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, which won the American Book Award in 1980. Her anthology of Senior Asian American memoirs, Window: Glimpses of Our Storied Past, includes the stories of former World War II Camp survivors. Lim has worked with past Jazz legends, such as Max Roach and Herbie Lewis as well as long-time collaborators, Jon Jang, John Santos, Francis Wong and Anthony Brown and the Asian American Jazz Orchestra. As a member of The Last Hoisan Poets with Nellie Wong and Flo Oy Wong, they recently celebrated the pioneering African American artist, Faith Ringgold at the De Young Museum. As an Activist poet committed to promoting diversity, Lim has collaborated with African American musician-educator, Marshall Trammell, in works such as Don’t Shoot! A Requiem in Black, dedicated to Sandra Bland and victims of police violence. Now with the alarming rise in hate crimes against Asians, Lim has focused much of her work to raising awareness against racial violence and social injustice.
MK Chavez is an Afro-Latinx writer, educator, multi-disciplinary artist, and curator. Chavez co-directs Berkeley Poetry Festival and is co-founder/curator of Lyrics & Dirges reading series. Chavez's writing explores identity, social justice, environmental degradation, horror cinema, magic, and ritual and has been recognized with a Pen Oakland Josephine Miles award, San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award, and is a 2023 YBCA 100 fellow. Chavez’s literary offerings include Dear Animal, Mothermorphosis, the lyric essay chapbook A Brief History of the Selfie, and Virgin Eyes. Recent work can be found among the trees in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park through the Voices of the Trees Project.