on saturday, september 14
California State Parks & Quiet Lightning present:
~ Poetry in Parks 2024 ~
@ China Camp Village</a
12-5pm, free + all ages
with
Readings by YPL Mira Sridharan, Ambassadors Clarisse Kim + Lucy Bakowski!
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.
Lucy Bakowski grew up in Fairfax, California. She’s been writing since she was old enough to pick up a pen, and has found in poetry a safe haven on her journey of self-discovery. She is currently working on her first collection of poems for publication, which already includes more than 250 original poems, and spends two-three hours a day on the practice and craft of writing. She has a vision for the power of art to awaken the human soul and differently open hearts and minds to a just and peaceful world. With Pseads Institute, Lucy will be author of a monthly column, creator of poetry curriculum, strategic advisor, and a workshop co-facilitator.
The Marin County Youth Poet Laureate program is sponsored by:
Live music by Zoë Winter
Listen to her album, New Mexico
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 queer Moroccan, Black, and Muslim artist and writer born and raised in the Bay Area. Sarah’s work grapples with the impact of colonial violence on familial memory and the way systems of oppression shape the most intimate detail of our lives.Sarah’s debut collection, Even Two Hands Pressed Together Are Split, brought together poetry, photography, and ephemera to create an immersive experience for readers to explore the way embodied trauma shapes all of our relationships. Her writing has been featured in the Institute for Palestine Studies, The Nation, and Teen Vogue. When she is not writing, you can find her scheming on the end of empire, swimming laps, or on IG and Twitter @atayqueen.
with special host
Tadeh Kennedy is an Oakland based writer, educator, editor, musician, and comics maker. He is deeply impacted by his Armenian roots, exploring the intersections of borders, language, and erasure, writing horror, speculative, and historical fiction. He hopes to see the inside of a volcano one day.
Tadeh is a Joe Brainard Fellowship recipient, served as the fiction editor for Fourteen Hills Magazine between 2021-2023, is a lecturer at SFSU, and has led writing workshops in Yerevan and Gyumri, Armenia. He has worked as a writing coach and freelance editor for three years and is working on his debut novel.
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! 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. With readings by:
A note about our submissions
We received 108 entries and of those selected 17 (16%). Of those 17, 7 (41%) are appearing at Quiet Lightning for the first time. Returning are Susana Praver-Pérez (this will be her 2nd), Heather Bourbeau (5th), Norma Smith (3rd), Dani Burlison (4th), Chun Yu 俞淳 (2nd), Katie Wheeler-Dubin (8th), Terri Glass (2nd), Shirley Huey (3rd) and Charlie Getter (12th). This will be QL’s 160th event.
Because this is our first time opening up for submissions in a few years, we used a method that was new to us and learned a couple of things in the process:
- We added an optional demographic survey to the submission form after a small % of people had sent in their work, and some decided not to fill out the survey or to only fill out some of it. But you can see the responses below:
2. If you are using Google Forms and include a question such as “What is your email?” as a required question, but do not select the “Collect emails” function in your form settings, your form will not collect submitter emails! Don’t make this mistake, which we were mortified to discover we had made.
For this reason, there is a small percentage of people who sent in work who have not received an email; if you are one of these people, please accept our deepest apologies and write evan@quietlightning.org. We tried our best to find everyone’s email but came up a little short.
To everyone who sent in writing: we thank you sincerely for giving us an opportunity to consider your writing, and are deeply grateful to you for caring about Quiet Lightning and for trusting us with your work.
The full schedule is roughly as follows –
times subject to fluctuate slightly:
12pm: Snack table, water station, greeter and book tables open
12:20p: Live music by Zoë Winter, introduced by Kelsey Schimmelman
1:00p: Welcome, readings by Marin County Youth Poet Laureate & Ambassadors
1:30p: Better Ancestors, hosted by Tadeh Kennedy
2:30p: Live music by Zoë Winter, set 2
3:00p: Literary mixtape set 1, hosted by Connie Zheng & Evan Karp
3:30p: Set break
3:45p: Literary mixtape set 2
4:30p: Thank you, mingling, trash + break-down
7:15p: Sunset
After sunset: the park is closed
Please note: China Camp Village is not fully accessible but we can accommodate most if not all advance requests. If you have an accessibility-related question or concern, please reach out to evan@quietlightning.org and we’ll do our absolute best to accommodate you.
Poetry in Parks is a program of Arts in California Parks, a California State Parks program created in partnership with California Arts Council and Parks California.
