ABOUT THE ARTISTS: 

Born in Daejeon, South Korea, and adopted at 10 months old, Lee Herrick grew up in California. He is the author of the poetry collections Scar and Flower (2018), Gardening Secrets of the Dead (2012), and This Many Miles from Desire (2007). His poems have appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies, including The Bloomsbury Review, ZYZZYVA, Highway 99: A Literary Journey Through California’s Great Central Valley (2nd edition), One for the Money: The Sentence as Poetic Form, and Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice, among others. Poet Brian Turner writes that Herrick’s poetry is “Whitman revised … with a voice that is politically engaged and rooted in compassion. Gardening Secrets of the Dead is a wise, gorgeous book.” He is co-editor, with Leah Silvieus, of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (2020). From 2015 to 2017, Herrick served as poet laureate of Fresno, California. Herrick lives in Fresno and teaches at Fresno City College and in the low-residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College.

David Flores is an educator, artist, mindfulness trainer, father, husband, and poet/MC. He is the current Poet Laureate of Richmond CA where he was born and raised and is passionate about creating safe spaces for self-expression using the arts and mindfulness so that folks can grow into their highest selves.

Tongo Eisen-Martin was born in San Francisco and earned his MA at Columbia University. He is the author of Someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015), nominated for a California Book Award; and Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights, 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award, a 2018 California Book Award, was named a 2018 National California Booksellers Association Poetry Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize. In their citation, the judges for the Griffin Prize wrote that Eisen-Martin’s work “moves between trenchant political critique and dreamlike association, demonstrating how, in the right hands, one mode might energize the other—keeping alternative orders of meaning alive in the face of radical injustice … His poems are places where discourses and vernaculars collide and recombine into new configurations capable of expressing outrage and sorrow and love.” Eisen-Martin is also an educator and organizer whose work centers on issues of mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people, and human rights. He has taught at detention centers around the country and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. He lives in San Francisco.

MEET THE MODERATOR:

Aimee Suzara is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, and performer based in Oakland, CA. Her mission is to create and help others create, poetic and theatrical work about race, gender, and the body to provoke dialogue and social change.

Her poetry and plays have been produced, adapted, and published widely, and she has collaborated with a variety of choreographers, musicians, and dance companies for multidisciplinary productions. A cultural worker and professional educator for the past twenty years, she tailors and offers lectures, performances, and workshops to organizations, universities, and classrooms. Grounded in her education and practice in the literary arts, she also can offer individualized coaching and copyediting to guide and inspire your writing journey.