Hope in the Face of Despair
A Literary Salon for Our Times
Saturday, April 27, 2019
7-9pm
Please join us for an evening of poetry and discussion,
community building and consciousness raising, in the first of an ongoing Literary Salon dedicated to inclusion and equity. Let us lift up our voices, express love, and find hope together
as we resist, reclaim, and rebuild our communities.
Our Featured Poets
Ali Cannon Writer, organizer, activist, and public speaker, who is a recognized leader in the transgender community. Cannon’s provocative illumination of Jewish and transgender themes can be seen in the film, It’s A Boy: Journeys from Female to Male, and in the co-authored essay (with TJ Michels), Whose Side Are You On: Transgender at the Western Wall. His poetry appears in From the Inside Out: Radical Gender Transformation, FTM and Beyond. He is also the founder of the theater group, Transmen Tell Their Tales.
Prado Gomez Bay Area singer and writer born and raised in the
San Francisco Mission District, Gomez’s autobiographical writing reflects on family, race, gender, spirituality, gentrification, and sexuality from his perspective as a Mestizo-American man of trans experience. He developed his writing style under the tutelage of Cherrie Moraga and Ricardo Bracho.
Florence Miller Founding member of Shakespeare’s Sisters, Miller co- edited three anthologies, including State of Peace: The Women Speak. In the mid- nineties, she co-authored a renga trilogy with Alexis Rotella. She has published two poetry collections, Upriver (2012), and A Little Girl Straightening Worms (2019). A retired creative writing and English teacher from Oakland’s McClymonds High School, the 1972 Emmy-winning film by Allen Willis, Can You Hear Me? Young Black Poets from the Ghetto, is based on her students and their work.
Julian née Sara Mithra hovers between genre and gender, border mongering and mongreling. Their first book, If the Color Is Fugitive (Nomadic Press, 2018) follows vagrants around the collapsing frontier during a queer elsewhen. It’s a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Their work has appeared in Versal 12, Milvia Street, Storm Cellar, Sharkpack Annual, Anxy, Name and None, and inside bags of Nomadic Coffee.
Please refrain from wearing scents. Please remove shoes before entering the studio. Suggested Donation: $10
