‍Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003), Poeta en San Francisco (TinFish Press, 2005), Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010), To Love as Aswang (Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc., 2015), Invocation to Daughters (City Lights Publishing, 2017), Letters to a Young Brown Girl (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2020), and Wanna Peek Into My Notebook?: Notes on Pinay Liminality (Paloma Press, 2022). 

She is also the author of three chapbooks, For the City That Nearly Broke Me (Aztlan Libre Press, 2012), Cherry (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2007), and Easter Sunday (Ypolita Press, 2007).

She received her BA in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, her MFA at San Francisco State University, and she teaches in the Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program at University of San Francisco. She lives with her husband, poet and educator Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland.

Barbara featured in the Peninsula Virtual Bookfest co-hosted by Daly City Public Library.

Chun Yu, Ph.D. 俞淳博士 was born in China and grew up there. After graduating from Peking University 北京大学 with a B.S. and a M.S. in chemistry, she came to the United States to pursue her career in science. She graduated with a Ph.D. in biomaterials from Rutgers University. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard-MIT Program in Health Science and Technology (HST), where she began writing poetry and stories. 

Chun Yu’s first book LITTLE GREEN: Growing Up During the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Simon & Schuster), a memoir in free verse, has won multiple national awards. Chun Yu contributed to the award-winning anthology Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, edited by Maxine Hong Kingston (Koa Books). Her bilingual poem The Map 地圖 is published by Arion Press as its spring broadside, dedicated to the 2021 graduating class, their families and teachers around the country. Her graphic novel on Chinese history is to be published by First Second Books (Macmillan). Her work is taught in world history and culture classes in the U.S and internationally.

Chun Yu has won a San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant for her poetry in English and Chinese, which merges science, art, and spirituality based on her experience as an immigrant from an old culture in revolution to a new world with transforming science and technologies. Her poetry and essays have been published or are forthcoming in Boston Herald, Orion, Poetry Northwest, Arion Press, MIT Tech Talk, Xinhua Daily 新华日报, Poem of the Day (San Francisco Public Library), Konch, Heyday Books, and more.

Chun Yu is an honoree of YBCA 100 award (2020) for creative changemakers and community leaders. She has won a Zellerbach grant for Two Languages/One Community, a project that brings Chinese American and African American communities together in poetry writing and storytelling; a San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant for Tales of the Yellow Family, a graphic novel on Chinese American immigration history and stories; a Sankofa Fund for Cultural Heritage Grant through Alliance for California Traditional Arts (CATA) for Paper Son Soldiers, a multi-media project about Chinese American soldiers who came to the U.S. as paper sons through the Angel Island and fought in WWII as American soldiers.

Chun Yu has been invited to speak around the country and the world, including at the Pacific Asia Museum, MIT, Yale University, China Institute, Yahoo, Stanford University, Asian Art Museum, Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, New York, San Francisco, and Boston Public Libraries, and many other cultural and educational institutes.

Chun Yu lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.

Read Chun Yu’s poems, “A Drop” and “Seeking Sand Dollars / 尋⾙”

‍Karla Brundage is a Bay Area based poet, activist, and educator with a passion for social justice. Born in Berkeley, California, Karla spent most of her childhood in Hawaii where she developed a deep love of nature. She is the founder of West Oakland to West Africa Poetry Exchange (WO2WA), which has facilitated cross-cultural exchange between Oakland and West African poets. Karla is a board member of the Before Columbus Foundation, which provides recognition and a wider audience for the wealth of cultural and ethnic diversity that constitutes American writing. Her editorial experience includes a pan-Africanist WO2WA poetry collection, Our Spirits Carry Our Voices, published by Pacific Raven Press in 2020; Oakland Out Loud (2007); and Words Upon the Waters (2006) both by Jukebox Press. Her poetry book, Swallowing Watermelons, was published by Ishmael Reed Publishing Company in 2006. Her poetry, short stories and essays have been widely anthologized and can be found in Hip Mama, Literary Kitchen, Lotus Press, Bamboo Ridge Press, Vibe and Konch Literary Magazine. She holds an MA in Education from San Francisco State University and an MFA from Mills College.

Read Karla’s poems, “She Tweets of a Ten Point Plan,” “I Give For You,” and “Who Are You and Whom Do You Love Black Woman?”.

devorah major, San Francisco’s third Poet Laureate is an award-winning poet and fiction writer, a creative non-fiction writer, performer, editor, and part-time senior adjunct professor at California College of the Arts. She was poet-in-residence of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco for 28 years.  She has toured internationally in places such as Italy, Bosnia, Jamaica, Venezuela, Belgium, England and Wales, as well as throughout the United States both performing her poetry and serving on panels speaking on African American poetry, Beat Poetry, and poetry of resistance. She has two novels and seven books of poetry published.  

In 2021 four of her essays were featured in the DeYoung Museum’s 125 Years retrospective catalogue published by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Her first novel, An Open Weave, was awarded the First Novelist Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, was released by Seal Press and later sold to Women’s Press in London and resold as a trade paperback to Signature Press. Curbstone Press released her second novel (which includes poetry), Brown Glass Windows to critical acclaim City Lights Publishing released another book of ms. major’s poetry, where river meets ocean. and Creative Arts Books, Inc. released her third solo book of poetry, with more than tongue.  In 2019 her first international collection of poetry A Braccia Aperte (with open arms) in Italy and in 2020 califia’s daughter a Willow Books Editor’s Choice Award winner.

She is the recipient of a 2002 California Arts Council Spoken Word Literary Arts Fellowship. For over twenty years she has been a part of Daughters of Yam (a poetry performance group with Opal Palmer Adisa) which has released one book, two chapbooks, one poetry and jazz cassette and one poetry and jazz CD.  Ms. Major’s poems and short stories, and essays have been published in a number of anthologies  including: Stories for Chip, So Long Been Dreaming : Post-Colonial Science Fiction, Mojo: Conjurer Tales , Drum Voices Review, So Much Thing to Say, Heartspeak, Saints of Hysteria, 100 Poets Against the War , So Luminous the Wildflowers, Rites of Passage, Black Silk , Bum Rush the Page: Def Poetry Jam , Girls Like Us , Father Songs ,Streetlights: Urban Stories of the Black Experience , Thoughts to Savor , I Hear A Symphony , Poetry Like Bread , and many magazines  and journals including “The New Progressive”, “Caribbean Writer,” “Left Curve,” “Essence,” “River Styx”, “Black Scholar”, “Callaloo”, “Obsidian”, “Paterson Literary Review”, and “Zyzzyva,” She has received Pushcart recognition for her short story/poem, “A Crowded Table”. She was also a CAC Writing Fellowship in 1989.  She has also written two  “Start to Finish” history books for young people:  Rosa Parks: Freedom Fighter and Frederick Douglas: A Hero for All Times (1999)   She has edited and written introductions for six student poetry anthologies produced by the Fine Arts Museums Poets in the Galleries program.

In 2004 Ms. major was given a commission by the Oakland East Bay Symphony to collaborate with composer Guillermo Galindo to create and perform in Trade Route, a symphony with spoken word and chorus, that premiered in 2005.

In addition to teaching at CCA, ms, major has taught at New College and lectured at San Jose State, Humboldt College, San Francisco State College, Stanford University, and San Mateo, San Jose, and San Francisco City Colleges.  She has also taught poetry performance workshops at Laney College. She currently also teaches with the Osher Life-Long Learning Institute (OLLI) out of U.C. Berkeley.

In October 2020, as part of the Peninsula Virtual Bookfest, the San Mateo County Libraries hosted a reading to celebrate Deborah’s new book, Califia’s Daughter.

‍James Cagney is the author of Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory (Nomadic Press, 2018), winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. His second book of poems Martian (Nomadic Press, 2021) was selected by Mark Bibbins, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Ladan Osman to receive the 2021 James Laughlin Award. A Cave Canem fellow, Cagney lives in Oakland, California.

‍Poet, performance artist, and photographer Jennifer Hasegawa grew up in Hilo, Hawai’i and lives in San Francisco, California. The manuscript for her debut poetry collection La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living (2020) received the San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award and the collection itself was longlisted for The Believer Book Award in Poetry. In a review of this book for his blog, Rob McLennan writes, “Hasegawa’s lyrics write slant on home and displacement, from the traveller to the immigrant to the notion of the alien (both immigrant and extraterrestrial). … This is an impressive debut, and Hasegawa’s poems are remarkably vibrant, as the performance elements resound from the page with a force enough to echo, refusing to lay flat but to spark and sparkle with energy.” Jennifer featured in the Peninsula Virtual Bookfest co-hosted by the Daly City Public Library.

‍Jenny Qi is the author of Focal Point, winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award. Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships and support from Tin House, Omnidawn, Kearny Street Workshop, and the San Francisco Writers Grotto. Born in Pennsylvania to Chinese immigrants, she grew up mostly in Las Vegas and Nashville and now lives in San Francisco, where she completed her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology. She is working on more essays and poems and translating her late mother’s memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and immigration to the U.S.

Jenny featured in the Peninsula Virtual Bookfest co-hosted by the Daly City Public Library. Read Jenny’s poem, “About Face.”

‍Jason Bayani is the author of Locus (Omnidawn Publishing 2019) and Amulet (Write Bloody Publishing 2013). He’s an MFA graduate from Saint Mary’s College, a Kundiman fellow, and works as the artistic director for Kearny Street Workshop, the oldest multi-disciplinary Asian Pacific American arts organization in the country. His publishing credits include World Literature Today, BOAAT Journal, Muzzle Magazine, Lantern Review, and other publications. Jason performs regularly around the country and debuted his solo theater show “Locus of Control” in 2016 with theatrical runs in San Francisco, New York, and Austin. 

Jason featured in the Peninsula Virtual Bookfest, co-hosted by San Mateo County Libraries.

‍Josiah Luis Alderete is a full blooded Pocho, Spanglish speaking poeta who has been an active part of la Area Bahia’s spoken word scene for over twenty years. He was a founding member of outspoken word group “The Molotov Mouths” and is the curator and host of the long running monthly Chicano/Latinx reading series Speaking Axolotl which happens the 3rd Thursday of every month in el Zoom mundo. Josiah’s book of poems, Baby Axolotls y Old Pochos is being released this year from Black Freighter Press.