New Poem Up at Clarion Alley Mural Project

Things are heating up over at the Manifesting Differently Project! Poets and visual artists met a few weeks ago to brainstorm and collaborate on the upcoming new murals to be painted in Clarion Alley. I’m super excited to see these works come to fruition for our debut in late September. Manifesting Differently will have art installations at the Clarion Alley Mural Project, Artists’ Television Access, and the Minnsesota Street Project through the end of 2024.

In the meantime, check out my latest poem ‘to be femme’ on the Clarion Alley Mural Project site. As a lifetime Bay Area local, it’s incredibly fortifying to see my work in collaboration with this long time artist collective that’s meant so much to me throughout the years. The facade of Clarion Alley is ever changing and one that’s offered me a lot of comfort on my artist’s path. I recall taking my first professional writer photos in front of Shaghayegh Cyrous’ mural of Iranian women poets back in 2018, celebrating my first ever publication in Endangered Species, Enduring Values. The Manifesting Differently Project is such a wonderful full circle moment and one that I’m proud to celebrate with you!

Announcing Manifesting Differently!

I’m deeply honored to be involved in Manifest Differently, a new cross disciplinary art project! What is Manifest Differently? Read on to find out!

From Megan Wilson, Co-Director, Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP):

“Excited to announce the launch of Manifest Differently, a new project I have been developing with Kim Shuck.

Led by Clarion Alley Mural Project, a project of Independent Arts & Media, over the next year 2023/24 we'll be working together with 38 diverse, multigenerational visual/media artists and poets to interrogate the history of Manifest Destiny and its legacies of inherited and perpetuated violence, trauma, and addiction, and the outgrowth of resistance and resilience - giving fire to movements for social/ culture change.

The project is supported by California historian Barbara Berglund Sokolov, humanities advisors Mary Jean Robertson, Kyoko Sato, Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, Anita Chang, David A. M. Goldberg, and visual designer Drake Cepriano Dalmacio Manalo.

Participating poets and artists include:

Poets: Aileen Cassinetto, Avotcja Jiltonilro, Clara Hsu, Dena Rod, E.K. Keith, Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, Genny Lim, Josiahluis Alderete, Kim Shuck, Lauren Ito, Linda Noel, Lourdes Figueroa, Mahnaz Badihian, Maw Shein Win, Mk Chavez, Stephen Meadows, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Tureeda Mikell, Voulette Hattar

Visual and Media Artists: Adrian Arias, Afatasi The Artist, Amy Berk, Anita Chang, Barbara Mumby-Huerta, Biko Eisen-Martin, Carolyn Castaño, Chris Gazaleh, Katayoun Bahrami, Kim Shuck, L Frank Manriquez, Marcel Pardo Ariza, Megan Wilson, Rene Yung, Shaghayegh Cyrous, Shonna Alexander, Vaimoana Niumeitolu, Victoria Canby

The project will be presented 2023/24 at three locations – Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP), Artists' TelevisionAccess (ATA), and Minnesota Street Project (MSP), accompanied by a mobile-responsive website to be designed by Aaut Studio, with a book to follow once the project is completed. The openings of each location will be staggered over the course of the exhibition, and the website will continue following the exhibition period as an archive of the project to be built upon.

Deep gratitude to our funders: Creative Work Fund, California Arts Council, San Francisco Arts Commission, Zellerbach Family Foundation, CCA Center for Art and Public Life, and SF Grants for the Arts.

More about the project:

Using literary, visual, and media arts storytelling in conjunction with public programming, the collaboration will explore the expansionist ideology of Manifest Destiny, its continuing impact on multicultural and multi-ethnic communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, its legacies of inherited and perpetuated violence, trauma, and addiction, and the outgrowth of resistance and resilience - giving fire to movements for social change. As recognized in Argentina’s National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons in 1983, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, and others that have followed, we must acknowledge and witness the impacts of our history before we can move forward and ensure the same injustices are not repeated. Storytelling is a powerful tool to help provide deep witness, compassion, and inspiration to manifest differently.

Writing about the ongoing dispute with Britain over boundaries and the right of the United States to claim Oregon, journalist John L. O’Sullivan coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny” in 1845, but his words had much deeper implications and assumptions about the morality, divinity, freedom, and presumed superiority of a white America. Through the lens of Manifest Destiny, western expansion was viewed not only as a triumph for the spread of liberty, but it was also seen as foreordained and inevitable. This litany of legislation and the trauma it inflicted starts to flip the script, to shift the focus to the people who were the subjects of these laws that codified the removal, enslavement, displacement, and disenfranchisement that Manifest Destiny’s vision of progress through landed empire necessitated. Manifest Destiny left Indigenous people, People of Color, and many wage workers outside of the body politic, without rights or rights that needed to be respected. It is from this position, of recognizing the histories and experiences of those who have not benefited from the legacy of Manifest Destiny, that Manifest Differently begins; to see a world that manifests differently.”

Sometimes Dreams Come True

Scattered Arils has been out for a mere two weeks and it’s already sold out of its first print run! I’m astonished that we reached this milestone so quickly and humbled by so much support shown throughout the myriad writing communities I’ve been a part of for the last four years. Every debut author wishes to have their first print run to sell out because it shows other publisher that their work is worth investing in.

I definitely made it a goal to sell my debut out of its first print run & I have you to thank for meeting that goal! Don’t fret if you haven’t gotten a copy of Scattered Arils yourself; Milk & Cake will be ordering another print run & I will also have signed author copies to sell as well!

Come celebrate Scattered Arils being out in the world by attending a reading! I’ll be reading at the following events and hope to see you there!

• 6/4 City Lights Poets Read 6PM PDT at Jack Kerouac Alley

• 6/19 Moondrop Equinox 6PM PDT at Joaquin Miller Cascade

• 6/30 Essential Truths Launch Party 7PM PDT on Zoom

• 7/11: Poets in Pajamas 4PM PDT on Zoom

OutWrite 2021 Chapbook Competition!

Submissions are open for the 2021 Outwrite Chapbook Competition! We're interested in work that highlights the queer experience, but interpret that broadly. I’m so proud to be judge for the poetry genre and can’t wait to read your work!

• Deadline June 15th

• 20-40 pgs maximum

• No fee to submit!

• Submit here

It's a Book! The Scattered Arils Launch Tour

My debut poetry collection is forthcoming from Milk & Cake Press in only FOUR MORE DAYS! I’m doing a tour of reading series in the Bay Area and we’re having an OFFICIAL virtual launch party to celebrate on May 23rd at 2PM PDT! More details down below & we would love to see you at any and all of them! Don’t forget to purchase your copy here

05/14: Something Ordinary 7PM PDT on Zoom

05/21: Syzygy Magazine 7PM PDT on Tobia

05/23: Official Scattered Arils Launch Party 2PM PDT on Zoom

05/29: Saturday Night Social 7PM PDT on Zoom

Summer Dispatches

Well, September is only a few days away and we’re in the swing of Virgo season! So as a triple earth sign with my moon and sun in Virgo, it makes complete sense that I’m now back on this blog. After a busy Pride month in June full of readings and celebrations, I took July and August off in order to reground and narrow my focus on my health and personal well-being. I also felt conflicted about posting here and promoting myself amidst all the current events in our world, from Black Lives Matters movement uprisings, to Lebanese people rebuilding their lives after the August 5th explosion, to losing beloved actors who represented characters that were life changing and groundbreaking. But, it’s also really important to find the bright spots amongst our current darkness in order to be

But I have really great news to share!

• The manuscript I’ve been submitting to presses for publication has finally found a home! I’m so happy to announce that my first poetry book, Scattered Arils, will be published by Milk and Cake Press in May 2021! It was important for me to find a press that aligned with the message of the manuscript and I’m really excited to work with the folks at Milk and Cake Press. You can check out their other poetry titles here.

• Colossus: Home debuted on August 25th! Over 40 Bay Area poets and writers came together to contribute to this anthology, where 100% of the proceeds go to Moms4Housing. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz calls it a "…poetic tribute to the courageous Oakland Moms, who challenged power and housed their families in a vacant home, exudes passion for social justice and direct action in the birthplace of the Black Panther Party…” I’m honestly really proud to be a part of this collection and there will be virtual readings a plenty to showcase our words and raise funds for Moms4Housing. Join us at Poem Jam hosted by San Francisco Poet Laureate, Kim Shuck, on September 10th, from 6:00pm-7:30pm!

• Speaking of the San Francisco Public Library, this past week my poem trials, was published for 08/28/20’s Poem of the Day feature. The series began mid-May in response to the Shelter in Place orders and is curated by Kim Shuck. There is such a wealth of talent here in the Bay Area when it comes to poets and poetry; it’s really magnificent to witness. I wrote my poem trials in April for the 30 poems in 30 days challenge for #NationalPoetryMonth. The poem responds to the last four lines of sam sax’s poem On PrEP or on Prayer [“when i say pre-exposure prophylaxis”] where the Speaker asks “you know each new medicine trails / our dead behind it like wedding cans / listen / you can hear them now can’t you?”

• Did you know that I run the RADAR Productions blog? Each month we feature a QTPOC literary artist, be it poetry, short stories, fiction, or nonfiction writers! We recently shone our GLOW spotlight on Sister Spit alumni, Celeste Chan! Celeste is an amazing multidisciplinary artist who ran some of the very first writing workshops I participated in that were specifically for QTPOC. Last year, I produced a lot of the poems that form the skeleton of Scattered Arils in her Writing Rainbow workshops, that were led by writers such as Nancy Au and Meliza Bañales. YAY queer community!

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