Our acclaimed Home in the Bay Reading Series is back! Join us for the next events in the series, virtual readings featuring talented writers, storytellers, and folklorists ranging from indigenous culture bearers to previously unhoused authors to Bay Area transplants. Our second event is taking place Wednesday, June 29th at 5 pm.
The event will be free and include closed captioning. Please reach out to Aunt Lute Books at marketing@auntlute.com if you have any further accessibility needs; we are happy to accommodate.
Can't make it to the virtual event? No worries! We'll be recording this event. And next month is the third and final event of the series, so mark your calendars for July 20th at 5 pm. We look forward to seeing you!
ABOUT THE SERIES
Aunt Lute Books is pleased to present Home in the Bay, a California-based reading series centering the voices of those impacted by houselessness, gentrification, migration, and colonization. We are partnering with Sogorea Te' Land Trust, POOR Magazine, Poets Reading the News, Black Freighter Press and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, organizations doing radical work around our relationships to place and location as well as to each other.
THE LINEUP
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29TH, 2022
5 PM PT
We are honored to be featuring such a stacked lineup of literary powerhouses and cultural leaders. We are as excited as you are to hear their writings in community with you all.
Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu (PhD) is a Tongan scholar, storyteller and community organizer. She is currently a University of California Presidents Post Doctoral Fellow at the University of California, Davis and in Fall 2023, she will be an Assistant Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Maw Shein Win's most recent poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance's Golden Poppy Award. Mawsheinwin.com
Landon Smith (he/him) is a father, a professor, a poet, half Mende and half Balanta & Fulani, the amethyst geode on your desk, Angela Davis' afro, Frantz Fanon's pocket notebook, Walter Rodney’s fingernail, the 7-10 bowling split, your favorite pillow.
Despite his institutional degrees, he really became a poet through the East Side Arts Alliance in Oakland. Landon thanks his sister Alia for buying him his first journal, Brit Hill for pushing him to read poetry in public, and Black Freighter press for publishing his first book - No Bedtime Stories of Soil. Abolish all prisons and police.
Shikha Malaviya (www.shikhamalaviya.com) is an Indian American poet, writer, and publisher. She is co-founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a mentorship model press publishing powerful voices from India & the Indian diaspora. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and featured in Catamaran, PLUME, Prairie Schooner & other fine publications. Shikha has been a featured TEDx speaker and was selected as Poet Laureate of San Ramon, California, 2016. She has been an AWP poetry mentor in their Writer-to-Writer program for six seasons and is currently a Mosaic America Fellow, committed to cultural collaboration in the San Francisco Bay area and beyond. Her book of historical persona poetry, In Her Own Voice: Poems of Anandibai Joshee, is forthcoming in 2023. Her previous book of poems is Geography of Tongues.
Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo. She is the author of Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, sombra : (dis)locate, and the chapbooks profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She publishes across forms in visual art, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and scholarly work. She has received fellowships and residencies with the Obsidian Foundation, Community of Writers, Montana Artists Refuge, Macdowell, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale, among others. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She educates our present and future agitators/educators as a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, only the third Black person (all Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve that rank there. She is additionally a digital archivist, emerging visual artist, writing coach, and curriculum developer.
Norman Antonio Zelaya was born and raised in San Francisco, CA. He has published stories in ZYZZYVA, NY Tyrant, 14 Hills, Cipactli, and Apogee Journal, among others. He was a 2015 Zoetrope: All-Story finalist, and a 2019 Anginas Scholarship recipient for latinx writers to attend the Community of Writers Workshops in Squaw Valley, CA. In 1997, he co-founded Los Delicados, and has performed extensively throughout the US with them. Zelaya has appeared on stage, in film and in the squared circle as luchador, Super Pulga. Orlando & Other Stories (Pochino Press, Oakland, Ca, 2017) was his first published book. His new book,
Gente, Folks, (Black Freighter Press, SF, Ca) will be
released July 2022.
ABOUT OUR PARTNER ORGANIZATIONS
Poets Reading the News is a digital news platform based in the San Francisco Bay Area that bridges poetry and current events.
The Anti-eviction Mapping Project is a data visualization, critical cartography, digital storytelling collective documenting dispossession and resistance upon gentrifying landscapes.
Sogorea Te’ Land Trust is an urban Indigenous women-led land trust that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people.
POOR Magazine is a poor people led/indigenous people led grassroots non-profit, arts organization dedicated to providing revolutionary media access, arts, education and solutions to silenced youth, adults and elders in poverty across the globe.
Black Freighter Press is a publisher committed to the exploration of liberation, using art to transform consciousness. A platform for Black and Brown writers to honor ancestry and propel radical imagination.
Aunt Lute Books is an intersectional, feminist press dedicated to publishing literature by those who have been traditionally underrepresented in or excluded by the literary canon. Core to Aunt Lute’s mission is the belief that the written word is critical to understanding and relating to each other as humans. Through the sharing of stories, we strengthen ties across cultures and experiences, and at the same time honor the hurt, loss, and harm incurred through structural power imbalances, prejudiced and gendered systems, and ancestral trauma. We uplift these voices in order to build a more just future.
This project was made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Visit calhum.org.