Maw Shein Win is a Burmese American poet, editor, and educator who lives and teaches in the Bay Area. Her poetry chapbooks are Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA/Commonwealth Projects) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Invisible Gifts: Poems was published by Manic D Press in 2018. She was a 2019 Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at UC Berkeley. Win is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito, California (2016 – 2018). Her full-length poetry collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was longlisted for the 2021 PEN America Open Book Award, nominated for a Northern California Book Award for Poetry, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award. She often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and was a Spring 2021 ARC Poetry Fellow at UC Berkeley.

Maw featured at the 2019 Bay Area Poets Laureate Gathering & Public Reading, and 2020 San Mateo County Peninsula Virtual Bookfest, as well as in “Power to the Poets.”

Read Maw’s poems, “Quiver, fern,” “Huts,” and “Portal”.

Eileen R. Tabios loves books and has released over 60  collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in ten countries and cyberspace. Publications include the long-form novel DoveLion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times; the form-based Selected Poems, The In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku: Selected Tercets (1996-2019), THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL: Selected Visual Poetry (2001-2019), INVENT(ST)ORY: Selected Catalog Poems & New (1996-2015), and THE THORN ROSARY: Selected Prose Poems & New (1998-2010); the first book-length haybun collection, 147 MILLION ORPHANS (MMXI-MML); a collection of 7-chapter novels, SILK EGG; an experimental autobiography AGAINST MISANTHROPY; as well as one book translated into French and three bilingual and one trilingual editions involving English, Spanish, Thai, and Romanian. Her award-winning body of work includes invention of the hay(na)ku poetic form as well as a first poetry book, Beyond Life Sentences (1998), which received the Philippines’ National Book Award for Poetry (Manila Critics Circle). Her poems have been translated into 11  languages as well as computer-generated hybrid languages, paintings, video, drawings, visual poetry, mixed media collages, Kali martial arts, music, modern dance, sculpture and a sweat shirt. Additionally, she has edited, co-edited or conceptualized 15 anthologies of poetry, fiction and essays as well as exhibited visual art and visual poetry in the United States and Asia. 

Eileen featured in “Kapwa: Filipino Writers on History, Legacy and Building Community,” hosted by the Daly City Public Library.

Read Eileen’s poem, “Sudden Asian Prepper“.

Alan Chazaro is the author of This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album (Black Lawrence Press, 2019), Piñata Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), and Notes from the Eastern Span of the Bay Bridge (Ghost City Press, 2021). He is a graduate of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley and a former Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fellow at the University of San Francisco. He writes for SFGATE, KQED, Okayplayer, and 48 Hills, and is on Twitter and IG being a useless pocho millennial as @alan_chazaro.

Poem on Belonging

SELF-PORTRAIT AS AMERICAN

I say fuck
because it feels right
about now,
and I say love because
what wrong
could it bring?
I haven't shot a pistol
since my stepdad
flung his Desert Eagle
from the bedroom and took us
to burst freedom as kids.
The smell of sulfur
and devil, the pinch
of steel between my 10-
year-old finger. I didn't
seek this, was never good
at hitting body-
sized targets,
kept my eyes
shut while I curled
the trigger. It's heavier
than you think,
to hold and re-
lease thunder.
Not like the movies but
somehow like the movies.
Ears still ringing,
vibrations
in my bones.

Copyright © 2019 by Alan Chazaro. This poem originally appeared in the poetry collection, This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album (Black Lawrence Press, 2019). Used with permission of the author.

*Alan, a Redwood City native, featured in the Peninsula Virtual Bookfest, Burlingame Reads 2021, and Redwood City Public Library poetry events.

Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His curriculum on the extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His books include, Someone’s Dead Already (Bootstrap Press, 2015), Heaven Is All Goodbyes (2018 California Book Award and 2018 American Book Award), and Blood on the Fog: Pocket Poets Series No. 62 (City Lights, 2021). He is San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate and the co-founder and editor of Black Freighter Press.

Tongo featured in “Power to the Poets: Poets of Color for Change,” “Power to the Poets: Black History Month,,” and Peninsula Virtual Bookfest.

Connie Post is a San Francisco Bay Area Poet. She served as the first Poet Laureate of Livermore, California from 2005 – June 2009. During her term, she created two popular reading series “Wine and Words” and “Ravenswood”. She wrote 25 poems for civic and community events. The City of Livermore published this collection entitled In a City of Words.

Connie is an award winning poet, and the author of over ten collections of poetry. In 2012, her chapbook, And When the Sun Drops, won the 2012 Aurorean Editor’s Choice Awards. Her first full length collection, Flood Water, was released by Glass Lyre Press in 2014 and won the Lyrebird Award. Connie’s most recent collection, Prime Meridian, was released in January 2020 (Glass Lyre Press). Prime Meridian was a finalist in the International Book Awards, the Best Book Awards and the American Fiction awards.  It was also selected as a Distinguished Favorite in the 2022 Independent Press Awards. 

She has taught poetry workshops at Book Passage, Sebastopol Center for the Arts and many other venues. She has served as the keynote speaker at several Bay Area Literary events.Connie Post has been an advocate for autism for many years. She has presented to many local community colleges and groups on the subject of parenting and advocacy. Her podcast about having a son with severe autism was on a podcast, “Nobody Told me”, in early 2020.

Connie featured in the Bay Area Poets Laureate Gathering & Public Reading on September 21, 2019, hosted by the San Mateo County Arts Commission and the San Mateo County Libraries.

Thomas Stanton is the 2018-2020 Benicia Poet Laureate. Born to a writer and an artist, he grew up writing poetry and now he and his wife Christine own Bookshop Benicia, the city’s literary hub. He has been involved in Benicia’s First Tuesday Poets group since 2004. Tom is one of a very few Poet Laureates in California who is almost entirely performance-based.

Tom featured in the Bay Area Poets Laureate Gathering & Public Reading on September 21, 2019, hosted by the San Mateo County Arts Commission and the San Mateo County Libraries.

Shikha (Saklani) Malaviya is a poet, writer & publisher, born in the U.K. and raised in Minnesota and India. Her book, Geography of Tongues, was launched in December 2013, in India, to acclaim and featured in the Bangalore Literature Festival, Times of India Literary Carnival, Poetry with Prakriti & other festivals. Shikha is publisher & co-founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a literary press.

Shikha’s poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published in journals and anthologies such as Catamaran, Plume, Prairie Schooner, and Choice Words: Writers on Abortion. She is passionate about poetry & social change and involved in the poetry community through events/initiatives such as: crowdsourcing a poem on solar energy with Greenpeace India; writing a poem for Sankara Eye Foundation’s eye donation campaign; organizing ‘100 Thousand Poets for Change—Bangalore’, in 2012 and 2013; co-founding ‘Poetry in Public India,’ a movement to bring powerful verse by Indian women to public places across India; giving a TEDx talk on ‘Poetry in Daily Life’ at TEDx Golf Links Park, Bangalore, 2013. Shikha has been a mentor for AWP’s Writer to Writer program for six seasons and was AWP’s Kurt Brown Prize poetry judge in 2020. She was selected as Poet Laureate of San Ramon, California in 2016. Currently Shikha is a Mosaic America Fellow committed to cultural diversity and artistic excellence in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.

Shikha graduated from the University of Minnesota with degrees in liberal studies, creative writing and mass communications. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her family.

Shikha featured in the Bay Area Poets Laureate Gathering & Public Reading on September 21, 2019, hosted by the San Mateo County Arts Commission and the San Mateo County Libraries, and in “Power to the Poets” in 2020.

Ronnie Holland served as the City of Dublin’s First Poet Laureate (May 2008-2010), writing many “poems of place,” hosted poetry readings, and read at other events, dedications, schools and for Hope Hospice. She has been published in anthologies, newsletters, and two Ekphrasis chapbooks with artist Lily Xu. She continues to attend and read at regional poetry events, including the 13th Annual Mendocino Spring Poetry Event in Little River, and the state-wide gathering of California Poets Laureate in southern California October 2018.

Ronnie featured in the Bay Area Poets Laureate Gathering & Public Reading on September 21, 2019, hosted by the San Mateo County Arts Commission and the San Mateo County Libraries.

Kevin Gunn served as the Poet Laureate of Livermore from 2013 to 2017. He curated the Ravenswood Poetry Series and worked with grammar school students, giving workshops in local schools. He also started a Teen Poet of the Month contest program. He has been published in Song of the San Joaquin, California Quarterly, Chiron Review, and many local publications. Kevin’s chapbook, Hey Yard Duty, Johnny Said the F Word, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016.

Kevin featured in the Bay Area Poets Laureate Gathering & Public Reading on September 21, 2019, hosted by the San Mateo County Arts Commission and the San Mateo County Libraries.