Month of Love: February Lyrics & Dirges

Bring a date to this lit reading by five Northern Californian writers. We are feature local talent along with refreshments and a book store cat. All free!! Come enjoy and warm your winter bones.

Antmen Pimentel Mendoza
Grace Loh Prasad
Apollo Papafrangou
Will Preston
Lisa Rosenberg

Hosted and curated by Sharon Coleman

antmen pimentel mendoza (he, him, his & she, her, hers) is a scorpio, bakla, and writer. antmen is based in Huichin Ohlone Land (the San Francisco Bay Area) where he talks about pop music nearly all day and plays with friends. She works at a cultural center where she conspires with undergraduate students of color toward more free and just worlds, manages a community lending library, and geeks on curriculum development and workshop facilitation.

Apollo Papafrangou is the author of the acclaimed debut novel Wings of Wax (Olive Leaf Editions, 2016) and the story collection Concrete Candy, published by Anchor Books/Doubleday in 1996, with French and Danish editions. He has also written for HBO Films, which optioned the film rights to his story The Fence (2000-2004). His fiction and poetry has appeared in ZYZZYVA magazine, Oakland Review, The Bookends Review, Sparkle & Blink, and the Simon & Schuster anthology Trapped. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College in Oakland, CA.

Grace Loh Prasad was born in Taiwan and raised in New Jersey and Hong Kong before settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. Grace received her MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, and is an alumna of the VONA workshop for writers of color along with residencies at Hedgebrook and the Ragdale Foundation. Her essays have appeared in Longreads, Catapult, Jellyfish Review, Ninth Letter, Blood Orange Review, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Memoir Mixtapes, The Manifest-Station, and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. She is a contributor to the anthology Six Words Fresh Off the Boat: Stories of Immigration, Identity and Coming to America and has work forthcoming in Panorama, and the anthologies Ms. Aligned 3 and Chrysanthemum: Voices of the TaiwanesDiaspora, Vol. II. Grace is a member of The Writers Grotto and Seventeen Syllables, an Asian Pacific American writers collective. She is currently finishing her memoir entitled The Translator’s Daughter (www.translatorsdaughter.com).

Will Preston was born in Oakland where he is now a middle school teacher, and will complete the MFA program in creative writing at St. Mary’s College where he is also the Senior Fiction Editor for the literary journal Mary. His short fiction appears in Milvia Street.

Poet and recovering engineer, Lisa Rosenberg is the author of A Different Physics, winner of the Red Mountain Poetry Prize. She holds degrees in physics and creative writing, and worked for many years in the space program. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, she served as the 2017/2018 Poet Laureate of San Mateo County. Lisa’s poems explore natural and cultural landscapes, the art of making, and the drive to question inherited models. She was recently named a MOSAIC Fellow with Sangam Arts, and has been awarded a 2020 Djerassi Residency for Scientists and Artists.