Vernon Keeve III at Radar Reading Series
Channel: San Francisco Public Library
Date: 2018-04-15

Vernon Keeve III is a black and queer writer from Virginia, and a high school teacher in Oakland, CA. He has been featured at the SF Poetry Jazz Festival, the Berkeley Poetry Festival, and the Oakland Book Festival. His writing has been published in Ishmael Reed's Konch Online Journal, Black Girl Dangerous, Entropy, Foglifter, Buck Off!, and Blues Arrival: Stories of the Queer Black South and Migration; he received the Zora Neale Hurston Award from Naropa University in 2012. His book of poetry and essays, Southern Migrant Mixtape, was released in January 2018 by Nomadic Press. SHOW US YOUR SPINES is a month-long writer residency + reading in collaboration with the SF Public Library’s Hormel Center. For a month QTPOC writers work with Hormel Center LGBT archives around a specific queer theme, writing/producing a piece that will then be read/presented the following month at the Hormel Center. Each residency cohort is comprised of four writers/artists, who spend one month with a section/theme of the archives chosen by both RADAR and the library. During that month they write/create a piece inspired by the chosen ephemera. The residency brings QTPOC writers from the Bay Area into the library to work closely with their own queer history. Most queer young people are unaware of the library’s extensive LGBT archives or that the Hormel Center exists. This partnership activates this incredibly important space while providing an opportunity for queer/trans writers of color to interact with queer history and produce new work.