Kim Shuck has been selected as San Francisco’s seventh poet laureate, and will succeed Alejandro Murguia in early August. Her four published collections (three books and one chapbook) are Smuggling Cherokee, Rabbit Stories (prose), Sidewalk Ndn and Clouds Running; she says the chapbook Sidewalk Ndn is her best collection so far.

Read on, and also read this great piece on Kim from the Castro Courier here.

Kim’s first publication was in a Canadian First Nations magazine, The En’owkin Journal. The first reading series she organized was for the Native American Cultural Center in San Francisco. Subsequently, Kim has received various awards and accolades and has done much teaching. Kim was on the board of directors for California Poets in the Schools in the early 2000s, received a Diane Decorah award, various mentor awards, a local hero award from KQED and a Mary Tall Mountain Award.

She has been much nominated for a Pushcart, has co-edited two anthologies of poetry for PEN Oakland and publishes an infrequent online journal called “Rabbit and Rose” which doesn’t include her own work. She teaches poetry in a number of places including as a classroom volunteer in SF Unified and as unranked faculty at CCA. She has read her work at LitQuake, Flor y Canto, Petaluma Poetry Walk, Beast Crawl, Watershed, the Beatnik Shindig and other major gatherings.

Her work can be found in anthologies including The World is One Place (ed. Glancy and Rodriquez), Imaniman (ed. Silva and Vera), Red Indian Road West (ed. Schweigman and Day) and others forthcoming. She has also curated panels of Native poetry on permanent display on Alcatraz in commemoration of the occupations there.

We are pleased and proud to welcome Kim to Bird & Beckett for this reading at the outset of her two-year term as Poet Laureate of San Francisco.

Tongo Eisen-Martin, Nellie Wong, Clara Hsu, Ed Dang and others will lend their voices on August 2nd!