Passages on the Lake 33

Oakland’s premiere literary showcase gets the new year off to a hella strong start with Daphne Gottlieb, Sonya Renee Taylor, Tracey Knapp, Derrick Carr, and Haldane King, always free! (event photo by Bianca Tummings.)

Haldane King earned his Master of the Fine Arts degree in Writing and Consciousness from the California Institute of Integral Studies in 2012. Since then he has been presenting his fantasy and science fiction tales at local readings while working on a collection of short stories. He currently works as a data analyst and helps bring literature to the people with the Why There Are Words Literary organization.

Tracey Knapp first full-length collection of poems, Mouth, won the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award and was published in 2015. Tracey has received scholarships and awards from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fund. Her work has been anthologized in Best New Poets 2008 and 2010, The Cento: A Collection of Collage Poems (Red Hen Press), and has appeared in Poetry Daily, Five Points, The National Poetry Review and elsewhere.

Derrick Carr has lived in the Bay Area since he was old enough to read. He wrote & illustrated a book of bad poetry in 7th grade and he spends his time reading great poetry in the hopes he can someday atone. While getting his undergrad degree in black people with a minor in hugs, he helped co-found his college slam team which took 11th at CUPSI both years he attended. He also organizes and edits for The Lit Slam. Most days, he commutes between Oakland (where he sleeps) and San Francisco (where he makes money to buy poetry books) with a book under his nose.

Sonya Renee Taylor is an author, poet, spoken word artist, speaker, humanitarian and social justice activist, educator, and founder of The Body is Not An Apology movement. Taylor has won multiple National and International poetry slams, and has performed for audiences across the US, New Zealand, Australia, England, Scotland, Sweden, Canada and the Netherlands, including in prisons, mental health treatment facilities, homeless shelters, universities, festivals and public schools across the globe. She is an African-American woman who identifies as queer.

Daphne Gottlieb stitches together the ivory tower and the gutter just using her tongue. She is the award-winning author of 10 books including the new Pretty Much Dead, short stories about the people forced to live outside and hanging on to the edge in San Francisco. Previous works include Dear Dawn: Aileen Wuornos in her Own Words. She is also a winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Poetry, and a five-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She is currently struggling to hang on to her housing, and finishing a novel about anonymous sex.