POETS! Tate Swindell & Shane King Zackery + Open Mic

Shane King Zackery is a queer black poet, filmmaker, and technologist who has lived in the Bay for over 10 years. They like to sit in the river and talk in circles about being human. Occasionally, they write something down about the nature of time, space, and love.

Archivist, Editor, Poet and Photographer, Tate Swindell is the founder of Unrequited Records, which specializes in poetry records released on the vinyl format. Editor of On Valencia Street: Poems and Ephemera by Jack Micheline (Lithic Press, 2019). Co-editor of the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman for City Lights Books (2019). Tate, and his brother Todd, worked extensively on the Harold Norse archives, which were donated to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. He is currently writing short stories about his experiences in the San Francisco medical cannabis movement. Previous collections of writings include Palpitations; The Creation of Deadlines; Fotopomes and the most recent SOLAR HITS (Lithic Press, 2025).

Michael Koch and Jerry Ferraz host Bird & Beckett’s 1st Thursdays poetry series. The reading starts at 7pm with two to three featured readers, with an open mic following after a short break.

The reading, including the open mic, is welcomes all comers at no cost, although tips to augment the small honorarium awarded the featured readers by the Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project are encouraged and welcome at the break before the open mic commences. BYOB.

To help underwrite this 25-year tradition at Bird & Beckett, please consider a sustaining donation to the Cultural Legacy Project, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization charged with presenting, documenting and archiving the work of the region’s crucial corps of dedicated poets and musicians. Information can be found here: Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project