Hazel Reading Series – August 2018 edition

It’s August, and Hazel Reading Series is back after the summer break!
Join us for a late-summer night of poetry and prose by women.

Featuring
Charity Yoro nominated by Sophia Aguinagua
Ciera-Jevae Gordon nominated by Hazel Series
Mei Li Ooi nominated by Sasha Wright
Venuri Siriwardane nominated by Simmi Aujla
Wesley Cohen nominated by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett
Guest reader: Heather June Gibbons

Hosted by Sara Marinelli

5-10$ Suggested donations. No one turned away for lack of funds.

Heather June Gibbons is the author of the poetry collection Her Mouth as Souvenir, winner of the 2017 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize from the University of Utah Press. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Sore Songs and Flyover, and her poems have appeared widely in literary journals. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she lives in San Francisco, where she teaches Creative Writing at San Francisco State University and in the community.

Ciera-Jevae Gordon is a Richmond native Spoken Word teaching artist. She serves her community as Poet Laureate while facilitating poetry workshops for both 10-13 year olds, and 14-21 year olds. Her mission is bring liberation, light, and love to every space she is blessed to be in, while uplifting the lives of Black women and girls in particular.

Wesley Cohen is a writer and editor living in Davis, California. Her work has been featured by Joyland Magazine, Entropy, and some other places. She is a 2017 Writing By Writers fellow. She is the marketing coordinator at Yellow Pear Press, and serves as prose editor of Foglifter Journal. Wesley’s work lives at wesleyocohen.com.

Venuri Siriwardane is a writer and researcher with an eye on immigration policy, social media culture, and South Asian-American affairs. She spent five years as a business journalist in the New York area, then switched gears to earn her master’s degree in Politics and Communication from the London School of Economics. She lives in San Francisco and dreams of writing a novel that validates the experiences of young women of color.

Charity Yoro is a freelance writer raised in Hawai’i and based in San Francisco. She is the founder of Women of Words, a global community of women-identified writers; Gathering of Wands, an online writing circle series; and the co-host of HerMana, a forthcoming podcast featuring curious conversations with women artists & entrepreneurs. Charity is currently writing a poetry collection on the theme of belonging while pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at USF.

Having grown up in a muslim country in the 80’s, Mei Li Ooi is especially interested in exploring the ways women are policed and the ways they police themselves. She’s currently working on a novel that looks at how women try to gain control of their bodies in ways that are considered morally wrong.