ORGANIZER: Maw Shein Win
CONTACT: maw@redbridgepress.com
100 Thousand Poets for Change in El Cerrito!
Readers: Heather Bourbeau, Derek Lassiter, Mari L’Esperance, Kirk Lumpkin, Peggy Morrison, and Tess Taylor
When? Saturday, September 24, 3 – 5 pm
Where? The Scene, 10700 San Pablo Avenue, El Cerrito, CA 94530
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For more info, please contact organizer Maw Shein Win at elcerritopoet@gmail.com
http://www.el-cerrito.org/
This event is part of the City of El Cerrito Poet Laureate Program, which is supported by the City’s Art in Public Places Program.
Do you want to join other poets, musicians, and artists around the globe in a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote serious social, environmental, and political change?
September 24th is the global 100 Thousand Poets for Change Day, 2016.
Check out: http:/www.100TPC.org
*Bios
Heather Bourbeau’s fiction and poetry have been published in 100 Word Story, Cleaver, Duende, Francis Ford Coppola Winery’s Chalkboard, Open City, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and Tupelo Press. Her piece “Hopscotch” was nominated for a 2015 Pushcart Prize. Her journalism has appeared in The Economist, The Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy. She was a contributing writer to Not On Our Watch: A Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond with Don Cheadle and John Prendergast. She has worked with various UN agencies, including the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia and UNICEF Somalia.
Derek Lassiter works in several creative fields including music, photography and poetry. He studied with June Jordan and her Poetry for the People group, and conducted poetry workshops with Janice Mirikitani for Glide Church. His poetry appears in several anthologies and magazines. Lassiter’s new CD Music Outside was released in July of this year and is available through all major online music sources.
Mari L’Esperance’s first full-length collection The Darkened Temple was awarded a Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and published by the University of Nebraska Press in September 2008. An earlier collection Begin Here was awarded a Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press Chapbook Prize. With Tomas Q. Morin, she has co-edited Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, published in May 2013 by Prairie Lights Books and distributed by the University of Iowa Press. Mari is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of awards and residencies from the New York Times Company Foundation, New York University, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, and Hedgebrook. Her writing has appeared in print and online in Beloit Poetry Journal, Best American Poetry blog, Kyoto Journal, Mixed Roots Stories, Poetry Kanto, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Zocalo Public Square, and elsewhere. Of mixed Japanese and French Canadian-American heritage, Mari recently returned to live in the East Bay after nearly four years in Southern California.
Kirk Lumpkin is a poet, performer, lyricist, environmentalist, cultural worker, and event organizer. He is the author of two books of poetry, In Deep and Co-Hearing. He has released two poetry/music CDs, The Word-Music Continuum and Sound Poems. This Spring he became a California state certified Naturalist. His writing has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines. He’s done featured performances of his poetry all around the San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California, in Los Angeles, New York City, Colorado; Toronto, Canada and readings in England (under the auspices of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He has been featured on KPFA radio’s Cover to Cover – Open Book. He hosted the first spoken word/poetry open mics at Burning Man. He hosted the Café International Series in San Francisco when it was voted “Best Spoken Word Open Mic” by Bay Guardian readers and has been a pirate radio DJ. In 2014 he retired after 20 years of working for the Ecology Center primarily as the Special Events Coordinator of the Berkeley Farmers’ Markets. Last year he was on the faculty of the San Francisco Writers Conference.
Peggy Morrison is a California writer who grew up in Long Beach, then raised her daughter, Keema, in Watsonville while working as a bilingual teacher. Currently living and working in San Francisco, Peggy has recently read at Rolling Writers, Café Nefeli, San Francisco Open Mic Poetry TV Show, Bay Area Generations, Sacred Grounds, The Ave, Spice Monkey, The Vault, Beast Crawl and Pan Dulce Poets, and was published in Riverbabble #27, Day Without Art (December 2015), and Poecology #5.
Tess Taylor grew up in El Cerrito, California. Her chapbook, The Misremembered World, was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship. The San Francisco Chronicle called her first book, The Forage House, “stunning” and it was a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award. Her second book is Work & Days, which Stephen Burt called “our moment’s Georgic.” Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and other places. Taylor chairs the poetry committee of the National Book Critics Circle, is currently the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered, and was most recently visiting professor of English and creative writing at Whittier College. Taylor has received awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, and The International Center for Jefferson Studies. Taylor recently was awarded a Fulbright US Scholar Award to study and lecture at Queen’s University Belfast, in Northern Ireland, for six months in 2017. After many years on the east coast Taylor currently lives again in El Cerrito, CA.