Performance: Poem Jam

San Francisco Poet Laureate Kim Shuck presents a night of poets, featuring special guests, themes and writing groups. 

Poem Jam meets the second Thursday of each month. 

The September edition of Poem Jam will feature readers published in Colossus: Home.

Colossus Press is proud to introduce Colossus: Home, the second installment of an anthology series that gives voice to 70 Bay Area writers and visual artists as they respond to current political events. Colossus: Home is edited by: Sara Biel and Karla Brundage Available September 2020. 

Colossus: Home addresses the devastating housing crisis we face as a community and as a country. Inspiration for this theme was born out of frustration with the rising number of unhoused people in the Bay Area, and by the work of the brave women at Moms4Housing. We put out a call for poetry, prose and visual art and were met with an overwhelming response which reaffirmed the need for this vital collection. We chose “home” as the theme for our anthology. Home is a multifaceted concept. It touches on both profound joy and deep pain.

The home many of us hope for gives connection, nourishment and belonging. We experience these feelings in our bodies and hearts, in the places we come back to at the end of hard or wonderful days. We need this comfort and belonging in our neighborhoods and communities. The submissions we received spoke to the presence or absence of these qualities. 

Karla Brundage is a Bay Area based poet, activist and educator with a passion for social justice. 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. She has edited four collections including, 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.

Sara Biel is a poet, visual artist and social worker. Her work combines original text with different art materials. She is passionate about collaborative art and performance processes, and focuses on art as a medium for building community. Sara’s work has been featured in Oakland’s Moondrop productions and sPARKLE & bLINK. The editor of Colossus: Bay Area Poets Challenge Immigration Injustice, Sara and Karla Brundage collaboratively curated and produced the 2013 Temescal Insitu project.

Reservations required: http://bit.ly/PoemJam9-10-20