Literary Speakeasy 5-year anniversary celebration

Literary Speakeasy if five years old! So let’s have a virtual celebration and raise money for LYRIC, a great charity located in the heart of the Castro. This month’s performers include Chelsea Davis, Dazié Grego-Sykes, MJ Jones, Amanda Muñiz, Dena Rod, and Preeti Vangani. Your host and curator every month is James J. Siegel. Let’s raise a glass from the comfort of our homes and celebrate Literary Speakeasy, LYRIC, and the best Bay Area literary talent!

LYRIC’s mission is to build community and inspire positive social change through education enhancement, career trainings, health promotion, and leadership development with LGBTQQ youth, their families, and allies of all races, classes, genders, and abilities.

Performer bios:
Chelsea Davis is a writer from San Francisco. She has published essays in Literary Hub, Electric Literature, and The Racket, and her monthly newsletter, Shrieks and Howls, looks at the surprising overlaps between the comedy and horror genres, two films at a time. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in sPARKLE + bLINK and Vastarien, and she is currently at work on a poem cycle about classic horror cinema. More of her writing can be found at chelseamdavis.net.

Dazié Grego-Sykes is an Oakland based performance artist and activist. He is a graduate of The Experimental Performance Institute at New College of California and holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Writing from The California Institute of Integral Studies. Currently, he is touring two solo plays AM I A MAN and NIGGA-ROO while promoting his spoken-word album titled MAKE ME BLACK. This evening Dazié is reading from his collection of poetry and prose BLACK FAGGOTRY which was published by Nomadic Press in early 2020.

MJ Jones is a poet & parent living in Oakland, CA. Their work is featured or forthcoming at Anomaly, Kissing Dynamite, Rigorous Mag, & Borderlands Texas Poetry Review. They are an Assistant Poetry Editor at Foglifter Press. MJ has received fellowships from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, SF Writers Grotto, VONA, & Kearny Street Workshop. They are currently the Community Engagement Graduate Fellow in the MFA program at Mills College.

Amanda Muñiz is a Mexican writer born in Puebla and raised in Oakland, California. She majored in English Literature from San Francisco State. Her work has been published by Pochino press, and she has been a featured reader in various shows in the Bay Area including the electrifying ¿Donde Esta Mi Gente? the hilarious ¿Donde Esta mi Comedy?, BEASTCrawl, Literary Speakeasy, and LitQuake’s legendary LitCrawl. The immigrant experience has inspired most of her writing, which she considers a reflection and a testament of her family’s resilience as well as a never-ending letter of love and gratitude to her parents.

Dena Rod is a writer, editor, and poet based in the Bay Area. Through creative nonfiction essays and poetry, Dena works to illuminate their diasporic experiences of Iranian heritage and queer identity, combating negative stereotypes of their intersecting identities in the mainstream media. You can learn more about their work at https://www.denarod.com

Preeti Vangani is a poet & personal essayist. She is the author of Mother Tongue Apologize (RLFPA Editions), winner of RL India Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in BOAAT, Juked, Gulf Coast, Threepenny Review among other journals. She is the Poetry Editor for Glass Journal and teaches poetry with Youth Speaks in the Bay Area. She holds an MFA in Writing from University of San Francisco.

James J. Siegel is the host and curator of Literary Speakeasy at Martuni’s piano bar in San Francisco. He is the author of the poetry collection “How Ghosts Travel” (Spuyten Duyvil Press) and “The God of San Francisco,” set for release this October from Sibling Rivalry Press.