Author: Write Now! SF Bay's LOCAL COLOR Book Party

Listen to readings, buy books and party with some of the Bay Area’s best activist writers and special guests.

Featuring readings from James Cagney, Jasim 'Iolani Hakes, Susan Ito, Tureeda Mikell, Grace Loh Prasad, Shizue Seigel, Kim Shuck, Kimi Sugioka and Maw Shein Wen.   

Bios: 

James Cagney is poet and the author of Black Steel Magnolias In The Hour of Chaos Theory, (Nomadic Press, 2018), winner of the PEN Oakland 2019 Josephine Miles Award. His second collection, Martian: The Saint Of Loneliness, (Nomadic Press) was awarded the 2021 James Laughlin Award. James is a Cave Canem fellow who lives in Oakland. He has appeared as a featured poet at venues throughout the San Francisco-Bay Area, Sacramento, Vancouver and Mumbai.

Jasmin Iolani Hakes is the author of HULA (HarperVia), a complicated love letter to hometown Hilo, that is a Booklist best debut novel of 2023 and winner of HONOLULU Magazine’s Book of the Year (about Hawaiʻi). A mixed-race local who presents as haole, she writes of family oral history that includes Hawaiian blood as well as ancestors who migrated to the Hawaiian Kingdom to labor in the sugarcane industry from Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and the Portuguese Islands of Madeira and the Azores. 

Susan Kiyo Ito’s memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, from the Ohio State University Press, was nominated for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award, shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize, and named a best book of 2023 by the Library Journal. She co-edited the anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in Hyphen, Literary Mama, Catapult, Agni, Guernica and elsewhere. She is a member of the Writers Grotto. 

Tureeda Mikell, Story Medicine Woman, is a Bay Area based poet, educator, elocutionist, activist for holism. She is the author of The Body: Oracle of Memory and Synchronicity, The Oracle of Sun Medicine, nominated for a 2020 California Book Award. A “word magician,” UC Berkeley Bay Area Writing Project Fellow, Museum of the African Diaspora 2022 Poet in Residence. She has published over seventy anthologies by at-risk students through CA Poets in the Schools since 1989. 

Grace Loh Prasad is the author of The Translator’s Daughter (Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State University Press, 2024), a debut memoir about living between languages, navigating loss and the search for belonging. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Longreads, The Offing, Hyperallergic, Catapult, KHÔRA and elsewhere. A member of the Writers Grotto and the AAPI writers collective Seventeen Syllables. Prasad lives in the Bay Area. 

Shizue Seigel, director of Write Now! SF Bay, supports Bay Area writers and artists of color through workshops, events and anthologies. Her poetry collection Courting A Man Who Doesn’t Talk is forthcoming from Pacific Raven Press. Her eight books include five Write Now! anthologies and three books on the Japanese American experience. Her prose and poetry have appeared in sPARKLE+bLINK, Memoir Magazine, Colossus:Body, We’ve Been Too Patient, [HER]OICS, All the Women in My Family Sing and elsewhere. 

Kim Shuck is a Cherokee/Polish-American poet, author, weaver, and bead-work artist. She was born in San Francisco and is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She served as the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco (2017-2021) Her twelve books include Deer/ A-wi, Pick a Garnet to Sleep In, Deer Trails, Clouds Running In, Rabbit Stories and Smuggling Cherokee. Her open mics have nurtured and inspired decades of Bay Area poets. 

Maw Shein Win's full-length poetry collection Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) is forthcoming in Fall 2024. Her poetry collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award and shortlisted for CALIBA's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco.