Home in the Bay returns for final event!

Our acclaimed Home in the Bay Reading Series is back for one last event! Join us for a virtual reading featuring talented writers, storytellers, and folklorists ranging from indigenous culture bearers to previously unhoused authors to Bay Area transplants.

Our third, and FINAL, event is taking place Wednesday, July 20th at 5 pm.

RSVP Today

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.

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, JULY 20, 2022, 5 PM PT

We are excited to share the lineup for our upcoming event. We can't wait to hear their writings in community with you all.

devorah major is an art activist, poet, novelist, essayist, professor, mother, grandmother, friend and lover of the earth and its peoples. Born and raised in California, devorah major, served as San Francisco’s Third Poet Laureate (2002-2006). In 2019 her sixth book of poetry with open arms was released in Italy. A Willow Press Editor’s Choice her seventh book of poetry Califia’s Daughter was published by Willow Press in 2020. Her poetry play, Classic Black: Voices of 19th Century African-Americans in San Francisco was premiered at the San Francisco International Arts Festival in 2015. She has taught poetry in the schools, community organizations, juvenile detention centers and prisons. devorah major performs her work nationally and internationally with and without musicians. She has been a participant in international poetry festivals in Italy, Belgium, Bosnia, Jamaica, and Venezuela, and performed her poetry in France, the Bahamas and Germany.

Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, "Someone's Dead Already" was nominated for a California Bookstore Award. His book "Heaven Is All Goodbyes" was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffins Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award. His latest book “Blood On The Fog” was released this fall in the City Lights Pocket Poets series and named New York Times poetry book of the year. In 2020, he co-founded Black Freighter Press to publish revolutionary works. He is San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate.

E.K. Keith is a Latinx poet who shares her poetry in print, online, on the radio, at poetry readings, and sometimes on a certain street corner in San Francisco. Her first book of poetry Ordinary Villains (Nomadic Press, 2018) earned her nominations for the California Book Award, CLMP Firecracker Award, and the Pushcart Prize. She organizes Poems Under the Dome, San Francisco’s annual open mic celebration of poetry month inside City Hall. Her work as a public school teacher librarian has been especially interesting the past couple of years.

J Spagnolo is always trying to find out who J Spagnolo is, and how to be the best version of that. They have embraced the titles poet, editor, and artist, and in 2016 they cofounded the digital poetry journal Poets Reading the News. In 2019, J also became a parent to a wonderful kid, who they raise with their partner, the novelist Joseph Harry Silber. J is transmasculine and uses the pronouns they/them or he/him. He is a citizen of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Berkeley, California. If J had one wish, he would wish that everyone enjoyed complete mental health.

Kim Shuck is an indigenous writer widely published in journals, anthologies, and a couple of solo books. Shuck was awarded an inaugural National Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, and a PEN Oakland Censorship Award. Kim was the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco and has a forthcoming collection of essays from Andover St. Archives Press called Noodle, Rant, Tangent. They also authored the novel Exile Heart from That Painted Horse Press.

tiny (lisa) gray-garcia aka “PovertySkola” is a formerly unhoused, incarcerated, revolutionary journalist, lecturer, poet, visionary, teacher and single mama of Tiburcio, daughter of a houseless, disabled mama Dee, and the co-founder of POOR Magazine/Prensa POBRE/PoorNewsNetwork. With her Mama Dee- she co-founded Escuela de la gente/PeopleSkool- a poor and indigenous people-led skool, as well as several cultural and theatre projects such as the Po Poets Project/Poetas POBREs Proyecto (co-founded with Leroy Moore), welfareQUEENs, the Theatre of the POOR/Teatro de los pobres, and Hotel Voices. In 2011 she co-launched The Homefulness Project - a landless peoples, self-determined land liberation movement in the Ohlone/Lisjan/Huchuin territory known as Deep East Oakland, the Bank of ComeUnity Reparations and co-founded a liberation school for children, Deecolonize Academy and is the creator of a PoemCast from a poverty skola- a podcast series and as well is the co-host of Po Peoples Radio News Hour on PNNKEXU 96.1fm and bi-weekly on KPFA.

Tiny has taught Poverty Scholarship, the criminalization of poverty and poor people led liberation, poetry and media at universities and encampments across Mama Earth including Columbia and UC Berkeley. She has authored several essays for The SF Bay View Newspaper, 48 Hills and POOR Magazine as well as books including Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America, co-editor of A Decolonizers Guide to A Humble Revolution, Born & Raised in Frisco and co-author of Poverty ScholarShip - Poor People Theory, Arts, words and Tears Across Mama Earth , How to Not Call PoLice Ever, Po Peoples Survival Guide Through Covid 19 and the Virus of Poverty and the Homefulness Handbook- How to Build a Homeless, Landless peoples solution to homelessness. She also authored two bi-lingual childrens books: The Hardworker/El Trabajado Fuerte and When Mama and Me Lived Outside - one families journey thru homelessness (which has become an award winning animated short movie of the same name) and The Sidewalk Motel - poems and Poshunary from a poverty skola which was released in 2022.

Dee Allen is an African-Italian performance poet based in Oakland, California. Active on the creative writing & Spoken Word tips since the early 1990s. In the collection of badass poetry released on POOR press in 2019 called Skeletal Black: Poems from Beneath the Poverty Line, Dee tells the story of poverty, arson, displacement and removal us poor people face all the time, through all the evil means that the exploitative inhuman system called capitalism unfolds. Dee is also the author of 3 books [Boneyard, Unwritten Law, and STORMWATER all from POOR Press] and 16 anthology appearances [including Poets 11: 2014, Feather Floating on the Water, Rise, Your Golden Sun Still Shines, The City Is Already Speaking, What is Love and the newest from Vagabond Books, Extreme] under his figurative belt so far. Dee Allen is a member of the Po Poets Project of POOR Magazine and a founding member and resident of Homefulness - a homeless, landless peoples solution to homelessness.

Aunti Frances Moore is a Black disabled activist, elder, Black Panther and community leader from North Oakland/South Berkeley. She grew up in North Berkeley and has dedicated most of her time and care to her community. Aunti Frances used music for healing purposes while going through transition at a young age. She was honored to work alongside with courageous geniuses of the revolutions as a member of the Black Panthers. She continues on with the legacy of the Black Panther party using food as an organizing tool to fight against gentrification and displacement. In her work, she has touched the lives of many community members, housed and houseless, through her Self-help Hunger Program. She has helped transform Driver Plaza from a tiny patch of grass and cement to a fruiting edible garden and community hub. She is vital to the life of the neighborhood and is a memory-keeper and storyteller who preserves our history even as the city faces so many rapid changes. Frances is a brilliant actor and writer and has starred in Teatro de los Pobres productions since 2016. She is a founding member of Homefulness and the co-author of How to Not Call the PoLice ever and the Making of Aunti Volume 1 & 11 on poorpress.net

Muteado Silencio is an Indigenous Purepecha/Raza artist, writer, poverty skola, danzante, media producer, teacher and poet from Michoacan, Mexico. Co–teacher and member of the Poetas POBRES/Po Poets Project at Prensa POBRE (POOR Magazine), In/migrant & Indigenous and revolutionary artist & scholar in residence at the Race, Poverty Media Justice Institute, co-founder of Homefulness and staff writer for Voces de inmigrantes en resistencia and community Activist. He is the co-host of Po Peoples Radio on PNNKEXU 96.1fm and creator and host of bilingual radio Voces DE Inmigrantes en resistencia for PNNKEXU. Muteado is an actor, director and writer of several plays with Teatro de los pobres at POOR Magazine and with People of Color Action Theatre (POCAT) "We did not cross the border, the border crossed us" Raised in the East Side of Oakland by his single mother, born in Michoacan made in Oakland in a beautiful community of Black and Brown folks, land of the Homicides and Sideshows. "My pen is my gun, my words are my bullets", Done work with Color Ink, Theater of the Oppress, Oakland Unified School District, Unity Concepts, La Carpa del Feo....Muteado is a co-author of How to NOT Call PoLice Ever, and the Homefulness HandBook on Poorpress and His most recent book is Chimalli: Creando Arte Ceremonial / Creating Ceremonial Art available at poorpress.net

RSVP here

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.

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