Chinese American revolutionary feminist poet Nellie Wong, a Glen Park resident, grew up in Oakland’s Chinatown and came of age working in her parents’ restaurant there. Tracked into a working class path and following business classes at Oakland High School, she went to work as a secretary at Bethlehem Steel. In her 30s, in the late 1960s, Nellie enrolled at San Francisco State University, taking creative writing, ethnic studies and feminist studies classes and joining the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women, lifelong associations that continue to this day. Her development as a poet and her dedication to the struggle for radical social change took on a focused momentum in those years at San Francisco State which has continued for six decades.

In her mid-80s, in tribute to her engagement in poetry and political struggle, students at Oakland High successfully petitioned for a building at the school to be named for her.

Listen to an interview at this link for a good take on her development as a writer and a revolutionary activist.

Her most recent volume of poems is Breakfast Lunch Dinner (Meridian Press Works, 2012). Her first, Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park (Kelsey Street Press) was published in 1977, followed by The Death of Long Steam Lady (West End Press, 1986). Stolen Moments, a chapbook, was published in 1997. Her poems have appeared widely in periodicals and anthologies including those of The Revolutionary Poetry Brigade and Moonstone Press, among others, and one of her poems was published in 2023 on The American Academy of Poets’ Poem-a-Day webpage.

In 2022, Nellie Wong received PEN Oakland’s Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award.

Robert Eugene Rubino graduated from San Francisco State University with a journalism degree in 1979 and worked as a newspaper copy editor and sports columnist for more than 30 years. Born in New York City when the Giants still played at the Polo Grounds, he’s old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis and smart enough to solve the Times crossword puzzle on Mondays (other days not so much). He’s published prose and poetry in a number of literary journals and received a Pushcart Prize nomination for creative nonfiction in 2016.

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Following the featured readers, hosts Michael Koch and Jerry Ferraz conduct an open mic. In this month’s open mic session, poet Kim Shuck (San Francisco Poet Laureate, 2017-2020) will read poems by Neeli Cherkovski, who came of age in San Bernardino and Los Angeles and was a key figure in the San Francisco poetry world from the late 1960s up to his untimely death in March.

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