Performance: Local Color

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

Featuring books and readings by Andre Le Mont Wilson, Avotcja, Beverly Parayano, Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong, Dondi Dancy, Karla Brundage, Kelliane Parker, Kevin Madrigal, Kimi Sugioka, Shizue Seigel, Steve Fujimura, Tehmina Khan, Tony Aldarondo, Tureeda Mikell and Whan Young Choi. 

André Le Mont Wilson was awarded the 2022 Newfound Prose Prize for his chapbook, Hauntings, which interweaves racial violence past and present. He has been published in The Vincent Brothers Review, RFD Magazine, Obsidian Literature & Arts of the African Diaspora, Essential Truths, Civil Liberties United and Ina: A Queer Erotic Anthology. He teaches storytelling and writing to adults with disabilities in Oakland. 

Avotcja is an award winning poet, multi-instrumentalist and Bay Area DJ with weekly radio shows on KPFA and KPOO. Her expanded poetry collection, With Every Step I Take 2, was published by Taurean Horn in 2022. She’s been widely published in English and Spanish in the USA, Mexico and Europe. She has shared stages with leading poets and musicians such as Sonia Sanchez, Janice Mirikitani and Michael Franti. She’s been featured at AfroSolo, San Francisco’s Carnival, Asian-American Jazz Festival, New York’s Henry Street Settlement Theater and she performs frequently with her group Modúpue. 

Beverly Parayano was raised in East San José by immigrant parents from the Philippines. Her writing has been published in Narrative Magazine, Bellingham Review, The Rumpus and Essential Truths, among others. Her short story collection, Wildflowers, was recently published by PAWA Press. She earned a BA from San José State University, an MA from University College Cork and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She serves on the board of PAWA and on the executive committee for Litquake. 

Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong is a poet, multidisciplinary artist, engineer and mother of two children. Her Pushcart nominated poetry and fiction has appeared in The California Quarterly, The Columbia Review and Crab Orchard Review, among others. Liriope, her first play, was staged at Stanford University's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Her second play, There's No Stopping to My Thoughts, was staged at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center with a grant from the California Arts Council. Her poetry books include Ravel (NeoPoiesis 2010) and The Quenching (Finishing Line Press 2022). 

Dondi Dancy is a career paralegal, virtual book club facilitator and recent transplant to the SF Bay Area. She writes short stories, and prose-poetry as a means of remaining grounded. As a new Black creative, Dondi does not (yet) have a wealth of credentials, however her prose poetry has been featured in Brown Sugar Literary Magazine, an online publication featuring the writings of BIPOC womanist authors. 

Karla Brundage is a Bay Area based poet, activist and educator with a passion for social justice. She believes that in order to restore balance to earth, racist structures must be dismantled. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the author of Swallowing Watermelons and Mulatta- Not so Tragic. Her work is found in Konch, Hip Mama, sPARKLE & bLINK and Uncommon Ground. She is the founder of West Oakland to West Africa Poetry Exchange.

Kelliane Parker is a Queer, Latinx, Bay Area poet. Author of Down the Foggy Streets of My Mind (Nomadic Press, 2022), Kelliane was first diagnosed with what is now called disassociative disorder in 1991. She is a survivor of ritual and childhood sexual abuse, sexual assault and domestic violence. In her own words, she unearths secrets and deconstructs stories about survivorship. Her mission is to end the stigma of shame and blame that survivors face. 

Kevin Madrigal Galindo is a food justice advocate and decolonizer of health. He is a Chicano first-generation child of inmigrantes Mexicanos from Sur San Francisco. In 2016, he co-founded Farming Hope in San Francisco to provide employment opportunities in food for folks experiencing homelessness. A recipient of the Brooklyn Poets Retreat Fellowship for 2021, his work has been featured in The Boiler, Meniscus Literary Journal, The Antilang Project, Civil Liberties United, Essential Truths and others. His poerty book Hell/A Mexican was published by NomadicPress in 2022. 

Kimi Sugioka is a mother, educator and Poet Laureate of the City of Alameda. She earned an MFA from Naropa University and has published two books of poetry; the newest of which is Wile & Wing, published by Manic D Press. Her work appears in numerous anthologies, including Essential Truths, Uncommon Ground, and the upcoming anthologies, HerManos and Beat Not Beat. She loves cats and birds and spending time with her son. She believes that creating community through art is a revolutionary act. 

Tehmina Khan is a daughter of Indian immigrant scientists who has spent her adult life writing, teaching, resisting and mothering. She has taught science to preschoolers and citizenship to octogenarians; she now teaches English at City College of San Francisco, where she defends everyone’s right to a quality education. Her work has been published in PoetsEleven, Written Here, OccuPoetry, and Civil Liberties United, Uncommon Ground, The City is Already Speaking and Muslim Writers at Home. 

Tureeda Mikell, Story Medicine Woman, is an award-winning poet whose work has been published in many languages. She was cited as an ‘Activist for Holism’ by an Iranian doctorial scholar. She has published 73 anthologies of classroom writings authored by at-risk students. She is also a U. C. Bay Area Writing Project Fellow; the author of Synchronicity: The Oracle of Sun Medicine, nominated for the California Book Award; and the co-author/curator of EastSide Arts Alliance's Patrice Lumumba Anthology (Nomadic Press). She was Oakland Museum Poet In Residence 2006 and 2022 Poet-in-Residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora. 

Shizue Seigel is director of Write Now! SF Bay, connecting with Bay Area writers and artists of color through workshops, events and anthologies. She’s a VONA fellow who has written or edited eight books including five Write Now! anthologies. Her prose and poetry have appeared in Memoir Magazine, Colossus:Body, Lake County Bloom, and the anthologies We’ve Been Too Patient and All the Women in My Family Sing, among others. 

Steve Fujimura is a poet from San José, California. His writing engages with memory, history, loss and family. His work can be found in New American Writing, Milvia Street Art & Literary Journal, Essential Truths: The Bay Area in Color and other publications. His poetry collection, Sad Asian Music, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2022. He lives in Berkeley, California. 

Tony Aldorondo, Puerto Rican American poet/songwriter/performer, humbly admits to falling in love with rhymes from the moment he read Dr. Seuss in the 1970s and heard rap music in the 1980s. From then on, rhymes have been a part of his poetical DNA. He has performed in award winning films, and major theaters throughout the Bay Area and toured with the San Francisco Shakespeare festival. He has also featured at many poetry venues throughout Northern California. His poetry collections We Are Poets and Big Heart Poet were published by Humming Word Press in 2022. 

Young Whan Choi based his book Sparks Into Fire: Revitalizing Teacher Practice Through Collective Learning (Teachers College Press 2022) on his experiences teaching in South Korea, New York City, Providence, RI and Oakland, CA. Currently, he teaches the next generation of social studies educators at UC Berkeley. His writing on education has appeared in the Washington Post, EdSource, The East Bay Times, and UCLA's Xchanges journal.