Hazel Reading Series is Back

Hazel Reading Series is Back! Come celebrate our “return” on the lit scene and the beginning of Women’s History Month.

Powerful women’s storytelling, drinks, and the beautiful community of the Mission Cultural Center. No one turned away for lack of funds, but donations are very much appreciated ♥

Featuring:

MK Chavez
Oakland based writer, MK Chavez is the author of several chapbooks, including Mothermorphosis. Dear Animal, her first full collection was released in October 2016 by Nomadic Press. Chavez is co-founder/curator of the reading series Lyrics & Dirges, curator of Uptown Friday Readings in Oakland, and co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival. In 2016 she received an Alameda County Arts Leadership Award. Recent and upcoming publications include Heavy Feather Review, Story Magazine, and Medium for a 100 days of Action.

Cassandra Dallett
Cassandra Dallett lives in Oakland, CA. Cassandra is a two-time Pushcart nominee and Literary Death Match winner. She has been published online and in many print magazines, such as Slip Stream, Sparkle and Blink, Chiron Review, Stone Boat Review, and Great Weather For Media and reads often around the San Francisco Bay Area. A full-length book of poetry Wet Reckless was released on Manic D Press May 2014. In 2015 she authored Bad Sandy (Lucky Bastard Press), Pearl Tongue (Be About It Press), The Water Wars (Pedestrian Poets Series), On Sunday, A Finch (Nomadic Press) which was nominated for a California Book Award, and most recently Armadillo Heart (Paper Press) with MK Chavez.

Raina León
Raina J. León, Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006), CantoMundo fellow, Macondo fellow, and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, has been published in numerous journals as a writer of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Her first collection of poetry, Canticle of Idols, was a finalist for both the Cave Canem First Book Poetry Prize (2005) and the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (2006). Her second book, Boogeyman Dawn (2013, Salmon Poetry), was a finalist for the Naomi Long Madgett Prize (2010). Her third book, sombra : (dis)locate, was published in 2016 as well as her first chapbook, profeta without refuge. She has received fellowships and residencies with Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Montana Artists Refuge, the Macdowell Colony, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale. She also is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latino and Latina arts. She is an associate professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Soma Mei Sheng Frazier
Soma Mei Sheng Frazier is an East Coast Native living in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she presently serves as a 2017 San Francisco Library Laureate and final judge of the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Her award-winning fiction chapbooks, Salve (Nomadic Press) and Collateral Damage: A Triptych (RopeWalk Press), have earned praise from Nikki Giovanni, Daniel Handler (a/k/a Lemony Snicket), Antonya Nelson, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Molly Giles, Michelle Tea and others. Frazier’s writing has placed in literary competitions offered by HBO, Zoetrope: All-Story, the Mississippi Review and more. You can find her work online at Eclectica Magazine, Carve Magazine, Eleven Eleven and Kore Press – or read her interviews with CBS, SF Weekly and Women’s Quarterly Conversation. Recent work is available in Glimmer Train, issue 96, and ZYZZYVA, issue 106. She is at work on a novel and a screenplay. Soma is Chair and Assistant Professor of English and the Humanities at Cogswell College; Founding Editor of COG, a multimedia publication.

Maw Shein Win
Maw Shein Win is a poet, editor, and educator who lives and works in the Bay Area. Her writing has appeared in various journals, including Cimarron Review, Fanzine, Eleven Eleven, the Fabulist, and the anthology Cross-Strokes: Poetry Between Los Angeles and San Francisco (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions). She is a poetry editor for Rivet: The Journal of Writing that Risks and a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. Her most recent poetry chapbook Score and Bone (Nomadic Press) was nominated for a CLMP Firecracker Award. She is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito. http://www.el-cerrito.org/poets

And since we really want to celebrate and be exceptional, curators Sara Marinelli and Shideh Etaat will also read from their work.

Sara Marinelli
Born in Naples, Italy, Sara Marinelli is a writer, translator, and educator. She earned her PhD in English from the University of Rome and an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Her stories appear in New American Writing, Blue Mesa Review, and many Italian publications. For her fiction, she was awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Byrdcliffe Art Colony, and BANFF Center for the Arts. Sara teaches Comparative Literature at the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State University. She is working on a novel about family grief, set in a superstitious and religious Naples.

Shideh Etaat
Shideh Etaat is a writer and teacher at Mission High School in San Francisco. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. An excerpt from her novel can be found in Tremors, New Fiction by Iranian Americans, and she has published short stories in The Delmarva Review, Amazon’s online journal, Day One, and Foglifter. She is a 2011 Breadloaf Work Study Scholar and a 2015 James D. Phelan Award recipient. Her first novel is about a love triangle, Jews in Iran, and other strange and wonderful things.