San Francisco Poet Laureate emerita Kim Shuck invites Joyce Jenkins and Poetry Flash writers to celebrate this renowned literary magazine’s 50th anniversary and its mission of building community through literature. Readers include Joyce Jenkins, Lee Rossi, Richard Silberg and MK Chavez.

Kim Shuck was San Francisco’s seventh Poet Laureate. Her poetry draws on her multiethnic background which includes Polish and Cherokee heritage, and her experiences as a lifelong resident of San Francisco. Her most recent book of poetry, What Unseen Thing Blows Wishes Across My Surface?, a collaboration with visual artist LisaRuth Elliott, and her new book of essays, Noodle, Rant, Tangent, were published in 2022. In her term as Poet Laureate, she hosted scores of free poetry and art workshops for all ages at neighborhood libraries and schools and worked closely with San Francisco Public Library and the San Francisco Arts Commission to launch major citywide initiatives to honor Native American Indigenous Peoples' heritage.

Poetry Flash Literary Review & Calendar publishes book reviews, interviews, poems and event news for California. Poetry Flash also sponsors the Poetry Flash Reading Series, the annual Northern California Book Awards, the annual Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival and Poets in the Schools in the East Bay. In 2012 Poetry Flash received Litquake’s Barbary Coast Award for its outstanding contributions to the Bay Area literary scene.

Joyce Jenkins is Editor and Director of Poetry Flash Literary Review & Calendar. She is the author of the chapbooks Portal and Joy Road, and her poems have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Addison Street Anthology: Berkeley’s Poetry Walk and The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Watershed. Jenkins is the recipient of the American Book Award and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award.

Richard Silberg is Associate Editor and frequent Poetry Flash reviewer. He has published six collections of poetry, including the recent Deconstruction of the Blues, a PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award-winner, and The Horses: New and Selected Poems. Other publications include a book of critical prose, Reading the Sphere: A Geography of Contemporary American Poetry, and four co-translations of South Korean poetry, most notably The Three Way Tavern by Ko Un.

Lee Rossi is Contributing Editor for Poetry Flash. His new poetry collection is Say Anything (Plain View Press, 2024). He was born near the confluence of Greater Appalachia and the Deep South. During his lifetime the human population grew from 2 billion to 8 billion, and carbon dioxide levels rose from less than 300 ppm to over 400 ppm. He believes in the laws of physics. His religion is kindness.

MK Chavez is an Afro-Latinx writer, educator and curator. Chavez co-directs the Berkeley Poetry Festival and is co-founder of the Lyrics & Dirges reading series. The author’s writing explores identity, social justice, ecological resilience, horror cinema, magic and ritual. Her work has been recognized with a Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award, an Alameda Arts Leadership Award, a San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award and a 2023 Ruth Weiss Maverick Award, and she was a 2023 Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 100 fellow. Chavez’s literary offerings include Dear Animal, Mothermorphosis, the lyric essay chapbook A Brief History of the Selfie and Virgin Eyes. Recent work can be found among the trees in Golden Gate Park’s Voices of the Trees Project.

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