Performance: Kim Shuck’s Poem Jam,  One City One Book Edition
Channel: San Francisco Public Library
Date: 2021-04-08

Natasha Dennerstein, Molly Fisk, Kelly Grace Thomas, Kelliane Parker and Ramona “Mona” Webb lead a One City One Book inspired reading.

Natasha Dennerstein was born in Melbourne, Australia. She has an MFA from San Francisco State University. Dennerstein has had poetry published in many journals internationally. Her collections Anatomize (2015), Triptych Caliform (2016) and her novella-in-verse About a Girl (2017) were published by Norfolk Press in San Francisco. Her trans chapbook Seahorse (2017) was published by Nomadic Press in Oakland. She lives in Oakland, California, where she is an editor at Nomadic Press and works at St James Infirmary, a clinic for sex-workers in San Francisco. She was a 2018 Fellow of the Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat.

Molly Fisk edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She's the author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and Houston, We Have a Possum among other books and has won grants from the NEA, the California Arts Council and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Fisk lives in the Sierra foothills, where she teaches writing to cancer patients, provides weekly commentary to community radio and works as a radical life coach. 

Kelly Grace Thomas is the winner of the 2017 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle, a 2018 finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award, a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee and Best of the Next nominee. Boat Burned, her first full-length collection, was released by YesYes Books in January 2020. Their poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: Best New Poets 2019, the Los Angeles Review, Tinderbox, Nashville Review, Sixth Finch, Muzzle, DIAGRAM and more. They have received fellowships from Tin House, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Kenyon Review Young Writers’ and more. 

Kelliane Parker is a Bay Area poet and co-host of My Word Open Mic. Parker has performed in the Bay Area, and her work has been featured in local anthologies. Her work gives voice to survivors of sexual abuse and other violent trauma to heal and break the cycle.

Ramona “Mona” Webb is a scholar, practitioner, teaching performance artist and Afro-Creek queer activist. Mona formerly served as Artistic Director of Project ABLE and Lyrical Minded415, which is an Art Based Learning for Equity seasonal course implemented in SFUSD’s Title I Neglected school sites. For 10 years Mona served as poetry Slammaster of San Francisco.