June Lyrics & Dirges

Lyrics & Dirges invites you to a reading featuring 5 East Bay writers on Wednesday 21 June at 7:30pm at Pegasus Bookstore, 2349 Shattuck Avenue, downtown Berkeley.

Charif Shanahan

Nancy Patrice Davenport

André Le Mont Wilson

Andrew J. Thomas

Nick Johnson

Curated by Mk Chavez and Sharon Coleman.   Hosted by Sharon Coleman

Free refreshments and a bookstore cat!!!  Bring a date!

Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (SIU Press, 2017), winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. His poems and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including Baffler, Boston Review, Callaloo, Literary Hub, New Republic, Poetry International, A Public Space, and Prairie Schooner, which awarded him the Edward Stanley Poetry Award. He has received awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Cave Canem Foundation, the Frost Place, the Fulbright Program/IIE, Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Starworks Foundation. Currently, he is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.

Nancy Patrice Davenport was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and lives in Oakland, California. She has proudly raised a son as a single mother. Nancy has been writing professionally since 2011.  Her poems have been published in various journals and anthologies, [including The Burning Grape, Mountain Gazette, The Bicycle Review, Oakland Review, Lilliput Review, Blue Fifth Review, RED FEZ, Poetry Quarterly, Full of Crow, The Lake, Yellow Chair Review, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Blue Mountain Review, OTATA, and The Naked Bulb]. Nancy’s chapbook, LA BRIZNA, was published in May 2014; this year she had a broadsheet published and available by Country Valley Press. Her poems have been translated into German and Spanish. Nancy had a Best of Net nomination this year for her JUNE 2 RETROGRADE MINDFULNESS poem.

Whenever André Le Mont Wilson is asked for his bio, he always tells the same story. He was born in Los Angeles to parents who were both poets. When they died in 2012 eleven weeks apart, he began to write his own poetry. He later branched out into storytelling and has performed at many events throughout the West Coast. Last month, Haiku Anthology: Observations and Insight published a collection of his haiku. In November, The New Engagement will publish his free verse. Wilson lives in the East Bay with his partner and their Chihuahua.

Andrew J. Thomas has no classic training in the art of the written word, other than years of heartbreak and a love of whiskey. He is a founding member of the Beast Crawl Literary Festival and enjoys participating and supporting literary events in the Bay Area. He hopes his poems make you cry.

Nick Johnson was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland but now calls Oakland home. He received his BA in English from Morgan State University and his MFA in Creative Writing from the California College of the Arts. His work has been featured on KPFA’s Rude Awakening, and has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Brilliant Corners, Red Light Lit, Metazen, Samizdat, and Conversations at the Wartime Café: A Decade of War. His book music for mussolini was just released by Nomadic Press. He enjoys telling long-winded stories, Instagraming, making spicy curries, and drinking whiskey; typically in that order, but not always.