Thanks to everyone who sent in writing for our 9/14 mixtape!
We expect to announce the lineup in the 3rd full week of August.

on saturday, september 14

California State Parks & Quiet Lightning present:

~ Poetry in Parks 2024 ~

@ China Camp Village</a
12-5pm, free + all ages

with

Marin County Youth Poet Laureate ambassadors

Readings by YPL Mira Sridharan, Ambassador Clarisse Kim + others TBA soon!

The Marin County Youth Poet Laureate program seeks to support arts leadership in younger generations of poets by providing them with platforms that allow them to use their art as an active way of building social change in their community. This program is made possible by California Poets in the Schools in conjunction with Marin Community Foundation, Marin Poetry Center, Mill Valley Library and Urban Word NYC. Learn more here.

2024-2025 Youth Poet Laureate Mira Sridharan (Sophomore, The Branson School) started writing poetry in fifth grade for fun and since then has developed a passion for reading and writing. She got into poetry as a form of activism in the summer before freshman year and has been experimenting with it ever since. Outside of writing, her hobbies include cooking and walking her dog. She hopes to inspire other high schoolers to expand their comfort zones and share their stories.

YPL Ambassador Clarisse Kim (Junior, Abraham Lincoln High School)) fell in love with poetry as a freshman, when her English teacher showed her the potency of poetic nuance. Her sophomore English teacher described the writing process as “making sauce”—boiling essays worth of emotion down into a single rich stanza. Her work has been published in the Marin Poetry Center High School Anthology, the Weight Journal, and Under the Madness Magazine. When she isn’t writing, Clarisse can be found eating her weight in MadeGood berry granola bars or playing (and losing) crane games. She aimsto inspire youth to write more poetry and to cook as much sauce as our community can savor.

The Marin County Youth Poet Laureate program is sponsored by:

Better Ancestors

Karla Myn Khine is a Filipino-Burmese poet and writer from South Texas, currently pursuing her MFA at San Francisco State where she also teaches and is a recent recipient of the Daniel Langton Poetry Prize, an Academy of American Poets University Award, and a Marcus Graduate Scholar. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Pinch, Sho Poetry Journal, Poets.org, Radar Poetry, and elsewhere. You can find out more at karlakhine.com.

Alex Feliciano Mejía is a writer, artist, and researcher working across essayistic, poetic, and time-based media to study the contradictions posed to communities by racial capitalism. Their work has been supported and displayed by places such as Kearny Street Workshop, Southern Exposure, Root Division, and Gray Area. He is employed as an Assistant Professor of Critical Literacy at San Francisco State University, where he is also an MFA student in Creative Writing. Alex is also a lifelong skateboarder and sees skating as a foundational part of everything they do.

Kato Bisase is a Ugandan-American poet, essayist and short story writer who has recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. His work dances with a wide spectrum of topics and tensions, among them: human depth in a cursory world, the African experience in the American context, the Black experience in non-Black spaces . . . and the beautiful anxieties conceived inside all of them. His writing can be found in Peach Magazine, PopMatters, The Ana, and Protean Magazine.

Zouhair Mussa is a Sudanese/Nubian-American community organizer and multi-disciplinary artist from West Oakland. His art is based on the life he has lived and aims at addressing that which is detrimental to him and his community. He seeks to shed light on injustices that plague the places he calls home. He uses his art to remember the fallen and dreams of healing the struggle. Most importantly, he wants to uplift and inspire change with the aid of his artistic expression.

Sarah O’Neal is a writer, organizer, and poet Based in Oakland, CA.

Better Ancestors is a quarterly showcase of writers of color now in its 4th year. Developed in partnership with Michael Warr, the series features 5 authors reading or performing whatever they choose, and each author selects one performer for the following show, so the series – and community – is self-generating. All authors are paid and published in an end of the year anthology. You can watch all previous performances and follow the invitational lineages here. Better Ancestors was made possible in part through funding by California Humanities.

and

A Literary Mixtape

Our flagship series that started back in December 2009, the literary mixtape is a submission-based show featuring writing of all kinds. Selected through an anonymous curatorial process, writers are paid and published in a book handed out to the first 100 people. Authors read one after the other, without introductions or banter, so the text of the show – printed in the books verbatim – is presented as a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Curated by Connie Zheng and Evan Karp, this will be our first in-person mixtape since March of 2020! Authors will be announced soon. The books for this show – sparkle + blink 117 – will feature cover art by Kristiana 莊礼恩 Chan and will also be available for free online.