Organizer: Sharon Coleman and Jeanne Lupton
Contact: backyardpoems@gmail.com
Saturday, September 29, 2012
7:00pm until 9:00pm
Backyards: Poets for Local Change, 2012 100,000 Poets for Change
September 29, 2012—Hosted by Sharon Coleman and Jeanne Lupton
MK Chavez
Martin Hickel
Linda King
Rosa Lane
Adam David Miller
Sayre Quevedo
Mary Rudge
Terry Taplin
MK Chavez is the author of several chapbooks including Virgin Eyes , Zeitgeist Press. Her most recent or upcoming publications include Zone Three, 1616 Literary Journal, Squaw Valley Review, and Generations. She co-curates the monthly Berkeley based reading series Lyrics & Dirges. You can visit her website at www.mariakaylibchavez.com.
Martin Hickel began writing poetry during high school, where he also took up journalism, eventually founding the Lassen County Times, a weekly newspaper in Northern California. He assists Sonoma poet Geri Digiorno with the Petaluma Poetry Walk, and he runs the Marin poetry festival and Sunset By the Bay Reading series in Sausalito. He develops and maintains applications for legal services for clients in California and an alternative-family reproductive facility in San Francisco.
He has self-published half a dozen chapbooks and his work appears in a few anthologies and many web journals.
Linda Poetnoise King’s old eyes view the world in black and white, sometimes in the techno-color of vibrant cyber punk. She is a poet, performance artist, singer and songwriter, originally from Ohio. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing at Mills. Her work appears in Milvia Street and Shampoo. She’s an adjunct instructor at Berkeley City College.
Rosa Lane is author of Roots and Reckonings, a chapbook of poetry and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She moved to the Bay Area in to assist Joanna Macy in the writing of her work, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, published in 1983. Rosa also holds a PhD in Environmental Design and specializes in sustainable architecture and the monumental shift in design that needs to take place. Rosa explores themes of homophobia, classism, and environmental injustices in her poems to inspire personal, social, and ecological change.
Adam David Miller has supported Northern California arts and culture as teacher, writer, poet, radio and television programmer and producer, theater as actor, playwright and director for half a century. His most recent publications are Ticket to Exile and The Sky is a Page. See adamdavidmillerpoet@yahoo.com.
Mary Rudge is the Poet Laureate of Alameda, California. She’s a radical journalist, longtime community activist, multi-cultural TV producer, retired schoolteacher, and poet extraordinaire. Mary’s first book of poetry, Water Planet, dons a preface by Leopold Sedar Senghor, first President of Senegal, Africa and Négritude poet. Her subsequent books include Poems for Ireland; Oakland is a Holy City; Hungary, Austria, and Other Passions; Maps for Poets (published in India), and others. For ten years, she edited and published Poets and Peace International, read in ten countries and included poems in several languages. Anthologies she has co-edited include State of Peace; The Women Speak.
Sayre Quevedo is a native of the Bay Area and lives in Oakland, California. He’s a recent graduate of San Francisco School of the Arts in Creative Writing and currently attends community college. He works as a reporter for Youth Radio with publications in the Huffington Post, KQED, and National Public Radio. In his spare time he writes poetry and explores the city.
Terry Taplin is a 21st Century poet and arts-educator born and raised in Berkeley, California. He has taught poetry and creative writing in high schools across the Bay Area and beyond and represented the San Francisco Bay Area at several national Slam Poetry competitions at the youth collegiate and adult levels as a member of: The 2006 Bay Area Brave New Voices International Teen Poetry Slam championship team, as Youthspeaks Teen Poetry Slam co-champion alongside Isaac Miller in 2007, a member of the 2009 UC Berkeley Slam team ranked 3rd in the nation at the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational and as a member of the 2010 San Francisco Slam Team and 2011 Berkeley Poetry Slam Team.
Taplin’s poetry represents the transcendental alchemy of an opulent verse. Ever relentlessly championing the Natural World, it is a Hammer raised in response to the Cult of Modernism and a reconciliation of Masculine and Feminine Forms. Shot through with a savage and unforgiving Beauty, Taplin’s work reaches for nothing less than the Music of the Spheres.