May Day, May Day–Lyrics & Dirges

Jump from spring to summer with a literary reading that will leave you giddy and bubbly with. . .

DeMareon Gipson
Liz Green
Barbara Jane Reyes
Greer Nakadegawa-Lee
Anne F. Walker

hosted by Sharon Coleman

Free with free refreshments and bookstore cats–thank you Pegasus!!!!

DeMareon Gipson is a polymathic wordsmith from Vallejo, California, whose penned the book Looking Forward and composed a short film, The Plan, ” which was selected by East Bay Express as a Pick of The Week. The Plan combines visual art with Gipson’s poetry to broaden the definition of institutional violence imposed upon Black people. His poetry won the acclaim of the Academy of American Poets. In 2017, he was awarded with the Piri Thomas Poetry Prize. A political and cultural activist, Demareon created Heartspace, an open mic for poets, musicians and dancers that also provided local small businesses with vending and networking opportunities. In 2015, Gipson the founded the annual event “With Love,” which is a safe space for Black people to talk about love that is led by poetry. He recently started a small business, the Forward Publishing House.

Liz Green is a writer, performer, and educator based in Oakland, California. She was on two national slam teams. As a playwright and writer/performer, she has had her work produced at multiple local and national theater festivals. She received her BA from Vassar and her MFA from Mills in Creative Writing. She was a 2010 Lambda Literary Foundation Emerging Voices Fellow in Fiction. She attended the Tin House Writers’ Workshop in 2012 and was a Catwalk Artist in Residence in 2013. She is waitlisted at the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop in 2018. She has been published in several journals and anthologies, including Sinister Wisdom, Foglifter, Sparkle and Blink, and The Body is Not an Apology. She is in conversation with North Atlantic Books about publishing an anthology she is co-editing with Kelechi Ubozoh. She is Assistant Professor of English at Los Medanos College in Pittsburg, California.

Greer Nakadegawa-Lee is 14 years old and attends Claremont Middle School. She was a featured reader at the Berkeley Poetry Festival, and has performed at Bay Area Generations and the Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival. Besides writing, she likes to draw in her spare time. If you asked her what she explores in her poetry, she might not be able to tell you exactly, but she tries to write every day. She hopes to publish a collection of her own work someday.

Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Invocation to Daughters (City Lights Publishers). She was born in Manila, Philippines, raised in the SF Bay Area, and is the author of four previous poetry collections, Gravities of Center, Poeta en San Francisco, Diwata, and To Love as Aswang. http://www.barbarajanereyes.com/

Anne F. Walker’s poetry has won Eisner Prizes at UC Berkeley and Canada Council Arts Grants among other honors. Her full-length published poetry books include Six Months’ Rent, Pregnant Poems, Into the Peculiar Dark, and The Exit Show. Her recent poetry chapbook is when the light of any action ceases. She completed doctoral work at UC Berkeley and is an Assistant Professor at Holy Names University in Oakland, California. Recently she has been working on 100-word prose poems concentrate attention on precision of image, narrative, and language. They are part of a collection, Ink and Ink and Flesh and Length, that reflect on landscapes, bodies and rooted memories.