2023 Flash Reading Series

Rina Huang is still a half-child, teetering on the brink of adulthood. She is co-editor of The Steele, her school’s sole literary magazine, in which she also publishes frequently. A soon-to-be graduate of the College Preparatory School in Oakland, as well as a soon-to-be-freshman at Amherst College, she finds herself at the constant cruz of exploration, of newness. She is an alumnus of the Iowa Young Writers Studio, the Kenyon Young Writers Workshop, and the California State Summer School for the Arts, as well as a 2022 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate Finalist. 

Reading available Fri, April 7th

Adam Mansbach is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Go the Fuck to Sleep, as well as the novels Rage is Back, The End of the Jews (winner of the California Book Award), and Angry Black White Boy, and the memoir-in-verse I Had a Brother Once. His debut screenplay, for the Netflix Original BARRY, was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and an NAACP Image Award. Mansbach’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Esquire, The Believer, The Guardian, and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, The Moth Storytelling Hour, and This American Life. His next novel, The Golem of Brooklyn, will be published by One World in September.

Reading available Fri, April 7th

Ayodele Nzinga, MFA, PhD is a multi-disciplined artist, community advocate, arts educator, and cultural architect invested in designing structures that support cultural production. Working at the intersections of community well-being, cultural sovereignty, transformation, and change; Nzinga is a renaissance woman. She is an author, director, producer, thespian, dramaturge, member of Alameda County Women’s Hall of Fame, and the inaugural Poet Laureate of Oakland. Nzinga is the founding director of the Lower Bottom Playaz, Inc, Oakland’s oldest North American African Theater Company. Ayodele is also the founding director of the Black Arts Movement Business District, Community Development Corporation of Oakland and producer of BAMBDFEST International.

Reading available Fri, April 7th

Muriel Leung is from Queens, NY, Muriel Leung is the author of the Poetry Society of America’s 2022 Four Quartets Prize winning Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books) as well as Bone Confetti (Noemi Press) and Images Seen to Images Felt (Antenna) in collaboration with artist Kristine Thompson. She is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, VONA/Voices Workshop and the Community of Writers. She received her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from University of Southern California where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Humanities in a Digital World fellow.

Reading available Friday, April 14th

Việt Lê is an artist, writer, academic, and curator whose work centers on spiritualities, trauma, representation, and sexualities with a focus on Southeast Asia and its diasporas. Dr. Lê is the author of Return Engagements: Contemporary Art’s Traumas of Modernity and History in Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh,  and White Gaze. Lê has presented their work at The Banff Centre, Bangkok Art & Cultural Center, Shanghai Biennale, Rio Gay Film Festival, the Smithsonian, among other venues. Lê is a Headlands Bay Area Arts Fellow (2023-4) and a 2022 Stanford CCSRE Mellon Arts Practitioner Fellow.Lê is an Associate Professor (History of Art and Visual Culture [HAAVC] | Visual & Critical Studies [VCS] ) at the California College of the Arts and a board member Art Matters and Art Journal. vietle.net

Reading available Friday, April 14th

Andrea Abi-Karam is a trans, arab-american punk poet-performer cyborg. They are the author of EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019) and with Kay Gabriel, they co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2020). Their second book, Villainy (Nightboat Books, Sept 2021) reimagines militant collectivity in the wake of the Ghost Ship Fire and the Muslim Ban. They are currently working on a poet’s novel about crushes.

Reading available Friday, April 14th

Dr. Alan Pelaez Lopez is an Afro-Indigenous poet; an installation and adornment artist from Oaxaca, México; and a 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. Pelaez Lopez’s debut visual poetry collection, Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020), was a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award. They are the author of the chapbook to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020). Pelaez Lopez has been organizing with undocumented migrants in the United States for more than ten years.

Reading available Friday, April 21st

Natalia M. Vigil is a queer Xicana writer with native heritage, multimedia curator, and big sister of six, born and raised in San Francisco. She is the co-founder of Still Here San Francisco for which she was honored as a Local Hero by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. She is an arts administrator passionate about community-driven creativity and cultural preservation through artist sustainability.

Reading available Friday, April 21st

Leticia Hernández-Linares is the proud daughter of Salvadoran immigrants, Leticia Hernández-Linares is an interdisciplinary, bilingual writer, artist, & racial justice educator.  She is the author of Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl & Alejandria Fights Back! ¡La lucha de Alejandria!  Widely published, she is the co-editor of The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States, and an inaugural YBCA10 fellow.  She has lived, created, & protested in the Mission District for over two decades. A five-time San Francisco Arts Commission grantee, she teaches in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University.  

Reading available Friday, April 21st

Gloria Frym is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, short fiction, and essays.  Her most recent book is How Proust Ruined My Life & Other Essays (BlazeVOX, 2020). The True Patriot, a collection of proses, was published by Spuyten Duyvil. She has written two short story collections–Distance No Object (City Lights Books), and How I Learned (Coffee House Press). She is professor of writing and literature at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.  She lives in Berkeley.

Reading available Friday, April 28th

Yona Harvey is the author of You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love, winner of The Believer Book Award in Poetry, and Hemming the Water, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.  She is a Distinguished Visiting Professor in Poetry at Saint Mary’s College of California and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow.

Reading available Friday, April 28th

Tony Robles was born in San Francisco and is the author of two collections of poetry and short stories: Cool Don’t Live Here No More–A letter to San Francisco and Fingerprints of a Hunger Strike. His children’s book, Lakas and the Manilatown Fish just celebrated its 20^th year of publication by Lee and Low. He was named the Carl Sandburg Writer in Residence by the Carl Sandburg Historic Home in Flat Rock, North Carolina in 2020 and earned his MFA in creative writing in 2023 from Vermont College of Fine Arts. 

Reading available Friday, April 28th

Kaylan Black, 2021 and 2022 Oakland Vice Youth Poet Laureate and a member of the National Society of High School Scholars. She has been accepted into 3 colleges early. Kaylan is 17 years old and a Senior at Oakland Charter High School. She participates in a number of clubs and internships. She has been on the African American Honor Roll and Achievement, Honor Roll, and a Junior Community Organizer with ACCE. She says, “What is astounding about poetry is everyone has a unique style. People can build bonds through this art. Poetry is what you make it.”

Reading available Friday, April 28th