Performance - Echoes: Poets in Memoriam
Channel: San Francisco Public Library
Date: 2023-04-03

San Francisco Poet Laureate emerita Kim Shuck facilitates a poetry reading honoring poets who have recently passed. Featured readers include Clyde Always, Mahnaz Badihian, Dan Brady, Aileen Cassinetto, Paul Corman-Roberts, Kitty Costello, Tongo Eisen-Martin and Lauren Ito. Kim Shuck remarks, “The last few years have seen a lot of loss. It's not possible to mourn each and every voice, but we are going to read the work of some beloved writers. You will know some of them, but you are not likely to know all of them. Come celebrate the humans and the work you know and meet a few new ones through their poems.”

Kim Shuck was San Francisco’s seventh Poet Laureate. Her poetry draws on her multiethnic background which includes Polish and Cherokee heritage, and her experiences as a lifelong resident of San Francisco. Her most recent book of poetry, What Unseen Thing Blows Wishes Across My Surface?, a collaboration with visual artist LisaRuth Elliott, was published in 2022. In her term as Poet Laureate, she hosted scores of free poetry and art workshops for all ages at neighborhood libraries and schools and worked closely with San Francisco Public Library and the San Francisco Arts Commission to launch major citywide initiatives to honor Native American Indigenous People’s heritage.

Clyde Always is a surrealist, author and entertainer.

Mahnaz Badihian is an Iranian American poet, painter and translator. She runs the literary magazine MahMag, which brings the poetry of the world together. Badihian finished the translation of a book, Spalding Arise, with Jack Hirschman in 2014 and received her MFA in poetry from Pacific University. She is working on her latest novel, Gohar. Badihian’s recent collection of poems, Ask the Wind, was published in 2022. Currently, she is an acting member of the World Festival of poetry and travels to different world poetry events in India, Chile, Cuba, Italy, England, Bolivia, Peru and elsewhere.

Dan Brady runs the longstanding Sacred Grounds Poetry Open Mic.

Aileen Cassinetto is an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow and 2019-2022 Poet Laureate of San Mateo County. The founder of Paloma Press and author of two poetry collections and three chapbooks, her work has been featured in Poetry magazine and Fellowship magazine, as well as in exhibitions and special events at the San Francisco Public Library’s Filipino American Center, the Japanese American National Museum, and the Philippine Embassy in Washington DC. She received a Special Congressional Recognition and was appointed Commissioner on the San Mateo County Commission on the Status of Women in 2021.

Paul Corman-Roberts is the author of the full-length poetry collection Bone Moon Palace from Nomadic Press (2021). An original founder and organizer of the Beast Crawl, he currently teaches workshops for the Older Writer’s Lab in conjunction with SFPL, the San Francisco Creative Writing Institute and the Oakland Unified School District. He sometimes fills in as a drummer for the U.S. Ghostal Service, but mostly he is just exhausted.

Kitty Costello is a San Francisco-based poet, therapist and editor with the publisher Freedom Voices.

Tongo Eisen-Martin, San Francisco's current Poet Laureate, 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. Blood on the Fog is his newest collection of poems.

Lauren Ito is an American Gosei (fifth generation person of Japanese ancestry) UX (user experience) research leader, poet and community organizer committed to advancing equity through art and design.