3rd Saturday Poetry in Chinatown is a monthly reading series. It is curated by poet Greg Pond. In this series, each reading will have two featured poets. There will be an open mic before and after each feature. In this inaugural reading we’re honored to present poet, playwright and performer Genny Lim, and San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin. Sign up to read at the open mic at 1 pm. We will accommodate as many participants as we can.
Genny Lim is a recipient of the PEN Oakland Reginald Lockett and Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Awards. She was San Francisco Jazz Poet Laureate (2016-2018). Her award-winning play Paper Angels has been produced throughout the U.S., in Canada and China. She is author of five poetry collections, Winter Place, Child of War, Paper Gods and Rebels, KRA!, La Morte Del Tempo, and co-author of Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, winner of the American Book Award. Lim has collaborated with numerous jazz musicians, including Max Roach, Jon Jang, Francis Wong, Marcus Shelby and Del Sol String Quartet.
Tongo Eisen-Martin is a San Francisco native. He graduated from Columbia University and taught at its Institute for Research in African-American Studies. He created the 2012 curriculum We Charge Genocide Again. Tongo has also taught at detention centers, including San Quentin and Rikers Island. He is the co-founder of Black Freighter Press.
Honors and awards
Eisen-Martin’s 2017 book Heaven Is All Goodbyes, published by City Lights, won a PEN Oakland Award, the 2018 American Book Award, 2018 California Book Award, and 2018 National California Booksellers Association Poetry Book of the Year. His 2020 title, Blood on the Fog, published by City Lights was named a Best Poetry Book of 2021 by Elisa Gabbert of the New York Times
Odd Mondays welcomes authors Peter Kupfer, Genny Lim, and Michael David Lukas on Monday, December 5 from 7pm to 8pm in-person at 1270 Sanchez Street (Bethany Methodist Church) in Noe Valley, San Francisco. Free admission. Masks required by the venue. One block west of the Clipper Street stop on the J MUNI.
Peter will read from his new historical memoir The Glassmaker’s Son, Genny from her poetry collection Child of War, and Michael from his novel The Last Watchman of Old Cairo.
Books will be available for purchase and signing at the event and in-store and online with Folio Books San Francisco, 3957 24th Street in Noe Valley.
About the Authors
Peter Kupfer is a San Francisco-based writer, editor, and photographer. His stories about business and technology, the arts and culture, and other subjects have appeared in major newspapers and magazines, including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Observer, and Metropolis magazine. He was a copy editor at the San Francisco Chronicle for many years. The Glassmaker’s Son is his first book.
Genny Lim is San Francisco Jazz Poet Laureate emeritus. Lim’s award-winning play, Paper Angels, was the first Asian American play aired on PBS’s American Playhouse in 1985 and has been performed throughout the U.S., Canada and China. She is author of five poetry collections, Winter Place, Child of War, Paper Gods and Rebels, KRA!, La Morte Del Tempo, and co-author, along with the late Him Mark Lai and Judy Yung, of Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, which won the American Book Award in 1980. Her recent anthology of Senior Asian American memoirs, Window: Glimpses of Our Storied Past, includes the stories of former World War II Camp survivors. Lim has worked with past Jazz legends, such as Max Roach and long-time collaborators, Jon Jang, John Santos, Francis Wong and Anthony Brown. She is a member of The Last Hoisan Poets with Nellie Wong and Flo Oy Wong, who recently collaborated with Del Sol String Quartet in the United States of Asian America Festival.
Translated into more than a dozen languages, Michael David Lukas‘ first novel The Oracle of Stamboul was a finalist for the California Book Award, the NCIBA Book of the Year Award, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize. His second novel, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, won the Sami Rohr Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, the Prix Interallié for Foreign Fiction, and the ALA’s Sophie Brody Medal. A recipient of scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, William J. Fulbright Foundation, and Elizabeth George Foundation. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Slate, National Geographic Traveler, and Georgia Review. He lives in Oakland and teaches at San Francisco State University.
Genny Lim read poems about Water, Wildfires and War and sang Jim Pepper’s “Witchi-Tai-To” and “Besame Mucho,” accompanied by the Barry Finnerty Trio, featuring Finnerty, Akira Tana on drums, with bassist Peter Borshay, on the Festival Main Stage at Martin Luther King, Jr. Civic Center Park in Berkeley, California.
 Barry Finnerty, Genny Lim and Akira Tana at the 2022 Watershed Poetry Festival |
Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival is a collaboration of Robert Hass, Poetry Flash, Ecology Center/Berkeley Farmers’ Market, and Ecocity Builders. The Watershed Festival emerged from Robert Hass’s national Watershed initiative during his tenure as U.S. Poet Laureate, 1995-97, which explored connections between environmental awareness and the American literary imagination. The first two Watersheds were held at the Bandshell at Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.
Cornelius Art Center: Patio, 1928 St. Marys Road, Moraga, CA 94575
On Critical Mass, Lewis Jordan (alto, baritone and poetry), Sandi Poindexter (violin), Bruce Ackley (soprano and tenor), Ollen Erich Hunt (bass), and Jimmy Biala (drums/percussion) use improvisation and poetry to access a space of sincerity, engagement, and free expression. They are joined by Genny Lim on the title track.
With a unique interdisciplinary approach to poetry and music, this Bay Area musical ensemble brings an open spirit of improvisation to their original compositions. Performances highlight solo instrumental voices (saxophone, violin, bass, and percussion) as well as collective interplay. This year, the group released its fourth CD, Critical Mass (Innova 073).
653 Chenery Street, San Francisco, CA 94131
With B’kongofonic blood at the saxophonic root, well below surface engraving, resonating within its alloy, sounds are gathering to invoke a heroic people: kongo as “gathering”, a Central African people’s homeland; fon as “sound”, a West African people’s language; B’ referring to all “peoples” along the resistance continuum. Hear ye, the animating force of a strange horn sanctified!
Genny Lim – poetry, invocation
Hafez Modirzadeh – kongofon, assorted winds
Francis Wong – kongofon, assorted winds
John-Carlos Perea – electric bass, cedar flute, vocals
Keshav Batish – drums, tabla
Genny Lim and the ensemble perform Modirzadeh’s epic poem, Ode B’kongofon.
$25 cash cover charge; byob and a mask (optional if vaccinated)
Three master musicians and an esteemed poet join together in honor of their late colleague and friend Glenn Horiuchi, born February 27, 1955. Horiuchi, who passed on June 3, 2000, was a key figure in the Asian American arts movements & companies that flowered in the San Francisco Bay Area and up and down the West Coast in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.
Find the live stream on Bird & Beckett’s YouTube channel or Facebook page, and donate if you possibly can to support the musicians, the music and the venue!
Saxophonist Francis Wong, co-founder and creative director of Asian Improv aRts (AIR), notes that Horiuchi
“was a prime mover for Asian Improv aRts from our pre-history in the Asian American Movement until his transition. A role model and mentor for me and so many others, he played such roles as a musician, teacher, community organizer — most notably the redress movement but also in the El Salvador support movement, and of course Jesse Jackson for President — and Zen Buddhist practitioner, all the while being a devoted family man. He continues to inspire us with his life example, artistic work, and abiding spirit.”
Please join us next Thursday, Feb. 17 at 5pm for a live poetry reading and music performance with special guests: Genny Lim, Clara Hsu, and David Wong.
The event will take place in the gallery located on the second floor of the Minnesota Street Project
On view through Feb. 26
with a special poetry reading/music performance happening Thur. Feb. 17th in the gallery at 5pm!
“Looking for art-historical references, Xie has found some of the most powerful expressions of humanity in religious art, and discovered parallels and formal affinities between art of the East and West. He is particularly inspired by the complexity, intensity and drama in the portrayal of human suffering in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which he read over Zoom to his son Victor who was stranded at university during lockdown. He brings the same pathos and gravitas from Dante’s epic narrative to his subject matter through collage combining history and the present, the real with the imaginary.”
Anglim/Trimble
1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco, California 94107 [map]
https://www.anglimtrimble.com/exhibitions/xiaoze-xie-panorama-of-eternal-night
Genny Lim was San Francisco Jazz Poet Laureate (2016-2018) and a recipient of the PEN Oakland Reginald Lockett and Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Awards. Her award-winning play Paper Angels has been produced throughout the U.S., in Canada and China. She is author of five poetry collections, Winter Place, Child of War, Paper Gods and Rebels, KRA!, La Morte Del Tempo, and co-author of Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, winner of the American Book Award. Lim has collaborated with numerous jazz musicians such as Max Roach, Jon Jang, Francis Wong and Del Sol String Quartet.
Clara Hsu is a Chinese American immigrant from Hong Kong. She is a mother, piano teacher, traveler, actor, translator, poet, playwright, a BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) artist and a recipient of the Jefferson Award for public service in 2021. Clara’s children’s play, The Piano, a Play-Movie was selected to screen at the 2021 International Children’s Film Festival Seattle. Gai Mou Sou Rap is Clara’s best known work. Written in 2021 during the height of hate crimes against Asians, the rap has received over a quarter of a million views on the internet and the Palm Beach International Music Award
David Wong, Executive Director of Tranquil Resonance Studio, brings his passion for the ancient traditions of China to every note he plays on both guqin and guzheng and every cup of tea he brews. Studying music, arts, and pursuing his graduate studies with masters both here and abroad in China, he actively teaches, lectures, and performs around the San Francisco bay area, always enthusiastic to share all that he has learned and showcase the deep-rooted traditions and music of China.
Registration is FREE and available on Eventbrite.
A presentation of readings by a diverse, intergenerational, cross-section of writers, who include visual artists, educators, activists and professionals from the AAPI community, who will share their stories and poems, ranging from immigration stories and family memoir to gender and racial oppression, anti-Asian hate and police violence, written during the course of a writing workshop conducted by poet-playwright, Genny Lim. The online APICC workshops have met every week, throughout the pandemic. These memoir pieces were written in response to weekly writing prompts provided by Genny Lim. All levels and ages, from emerging to advanced writers, were welcomed and encouraged to explore and develop their individual voices and craft in a safe and communal atmosphere that allowed for constructive critique, dialogue, mutual support and growth.
FEATURED WRITERS
Vickie Chang
Andres Tangalin
madhvi trivedi-pathak
Susan Hayase
Susan Kitazawa
Grace Morizawa
Noah Kawaguchi
Leon Sun
Leslie Yee/Murata
Carole Chinn-Morales
Lynn Huang
Lisa Chiu
Yenkuei Chuang
Sharleen Boumer Ignacio
Mei Lam
Don Tow
For more, visit the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center website.