Please spread the word and consider attending these upcoming workshops on creativity + resistance.  Please note : must preorder $5-20 tix to attend

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/witness-and-resistance-in-the-mind-and-on-the-page-tickets-36624691438

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/witness-and-resistance-in-body-and-story-tickets-36625572072

Witness and Resistance in Body and Story

Alley Cat Bookstore and Gallery

3036 24th Street

San Francisco, CA 94110

Lifting Scars with Sharon Coleman
A somatic writing and movement workshop by Sharon Coleman. 2-3pm
Resilience depends on the quick scarring over of wounds, both psychic and physical. And they remain with us usually forever. They are emblems of what has touched us. They mend muscle and thought but leave tissue that interferes with movement and neuro-plasticity. In this workshop, we’ll use movement and writing to explore the shapes left by scars and to find movement, resilience, and determination from what has marked us. Wear comfortable clothes and bring a notebook and pen.
BIO: Sharon Coleman’s a fifth-generation Northern Californian with a penchant for languages and their entangled word roots. She has taught poetry, creative writing and composition for fifteen years at Berkeley City College. She writes for Poetry Flash, co-curates the reading series Lyrics & Dirges and co-directs the Berkeley Poetry Festival. She’s the author of a chapbook of poetry, Half Circle, and a book of micro-fiction, Paris Blinks (Paper Press 2016.)

The Composer’s Notebook with Tongo Eisen-Martin
In this workshop from 3-4pm, community worker and poet, Tongo Eisen-Martin explores how engagement in community can be channeled into music, innovation, and poetry.

BIO: Born in San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a movement worker, educator, and poet who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. He is the author of someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015), which was nominated for a California Book Award. He has educated in detention centers from New York’s Rikers Island to California’s San Quentin State Prison. His work in Rikers Island was featured in the New York Times. He was also adjunct faculty at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York. Subscribing to the Freirian model of education, he designed curricula for oppressed people’s education projects from San Francisco to South Africa. 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. He uses his craft to create liberated territory wherever he performs and teaches. He recently lived and organized around issues of human rights and self-determination in Jackson, MS.

TWO MORE WRITING + ACTIVISM WORKSHOPS

From writing prompt to action with Maya Chinchilla

How do you cultivate a reflective stance in your writing and prompts to invigorate your writing and activism? This will be addressed in Maya Chapina’s workshop at 2pm.

BIO: Maya Chinchilla is a Guatemalan, Bay Area-based writer, video artist, educator and author of “The Cha Cha Files: A Chapina Poética.” Maya received her MFA in English and Creative Writing from Mills College and her undergraduate degree from University of California, Santa Cruz, where she also founded and co-edited the annual publication, La Revista. Maya writes and performs poetry that explores themes of historical memory, heartbreak, tenderness, sexuality, and alternative futures. Her work —sassy, witty, performative, and self-aware— draws on a tradition of truth-telling and poking fun at the wounds we carry.

Her work has been published in anthologies and journals including: Mujeres de Maíz, Sinister Wisdom, Americas y Latinas: A Stanford Journal of Latin American Studies, Cipactli Journal, and The Lunada Literary Anthology. Maya is a founding member of the performance group Las Manas, a former artist-in-residence at Galería de La Raza in San Francisco, CA, and La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, CA, and is a VONA Voices, Dos Brujas and Letras Latinas workshop alum. She is the co-editor of “Desde El Epicentro: An anthology of Central American Poetry and Art” and is a lecturer at San Francisco State University, UC Davis and other Bay Area universities.

ResistBot Poems with Raina J. León

In this workshop at 3pm, we will write poetry and prose of resistance and use the tool, ResistBot, to send these pieces to our representatives and senators. Bring your notebooks, pens, and phones (if you have them) to text through ResistBot.

BIO:

Raina J. León, PhD, CantoMundo fellow, Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006) and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, has been published in numerous journals as a writer of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn,sombra: (dis)locate (2016) and the chapbook, profeta without refuge (2016). She has received fellowships and residencies with Macondo, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Montana Artists Refuge, the Macdowell Colony, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, among others. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She is an associate professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California.

For more info click on these links:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/witness-and-resistance-in-the-mind-and-on-the-page-tickets-36624691438

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/witness-and-resistance-in-body-and-story-tickets-36625572072