Vessel Gallery presents a Special Poetry | Spoken Word | Reading Event:
The Future is Now: Women Writing New Worlds curated by MK Chavez
Saturday, 9/15, 6:30–7:30 PM
From top left & clockwise: Michelle Lin, Maw Shein Win, MK Chavez, Marguerite Munoz,
Thea Matthews
Oakland based Latinx writer, MK Chavez is the author of Mothermorphosis and Dear Animal, (Nomadic Press.) She is the recipient of a 2017 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award and her poem The New Whitehouse, Finding Myself Among the Ruins, was selected by Eileen Myles for the Cosmonauts Avenue 2017 Poetry Award. She is a co-founder/curator of the reading series Lyrics & Dirges and co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival, a fellow with CantoMundo, and a writer in residence at Alley Cat Books.
Michelle Lin is a poet, community arts organizer, and author of A House Made of Water (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017), an examination of sisterhood, inheritance of stories, survival and trauma. She has taught or performed for the United States of Asian America Festival, Lamba Lit Fest, and Asian American Writer’s Workshop. She is a Kundiman fellow, co-organizer of Kearny Street Workshop’s reading series, and fundraising manager for RYSE Center in Richmond, California, a social justice youth center. She studied poetry at University of Pittsburgh’s and UC Riverside’s writing programs. Recent work can be found in Underblong, The Margins, The Wanderer, and HEArt.
Thea Matthews is an American poet of African and Mexican descent. Born and raised in San Francisco, CA,Thea utilizes Spoken Word to address the complexities of humanity, trauma, grief, resiliency, and ultimately, the triumph over trauma.A seasoned performer and published writer,Thea currently is working on her rst book–– a thematic collection of poetry incorporating urban life and ower medicine.
Marguerite Munoz writes on the border of Berkeley & Oakland. For the past five years and under the sponsorship of Alley Cat Books and Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguia, she has co-curated the monthly multilingual reading series Voz sin Tinta. Marguerite’s poems and creative non-fiction have been featured at Get Lit, Liminal, Poems under the Dome, Jingletown Reading and Open Mic, City Limits Gallery, the Cante Jondo Series, Literary Speakeasy, and she is honored to have poems published in The Haight Asbury Journal and Cipactli, the Latina/Latino Studies Arts and Literature Journal at SFSU. She also organizes a sporadic women's group with Chicana poet, educator and cultural activist Naomi Quinonez — because let's be honest - the future is female.
Maw Shein Win is a poet and educator who lives and works in the Bay Area. Her writing has appeared in many journals and several anthologies, including MARY: A Journal of New Writing, Cimarron Review, Poetry International, Fanzine, and others. Along with Amanda Chaudhary, she is part of musical duo Pitta of the Mind that combines poetry with abstract electronic music. A collaborative book with paintings by artist Mark Dutcher, Ruins of a glittering palace, was published by SPA/Commonwealth Projects. Her poetry chapbook Score and Bone is on Nomadic Press, and her full-length collection Invisible Gifts: Poems was recently published by Manic D Press. She is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito.
http://www.el-cerrito.org/1262/Current-Poet-Laureate