Mary Ratcliffe, Editor of the San Franciso Bay View Newspaper, says:

“Leroy Franklin Moore, Jr., aka The Black Kripple, the Champion of Disabled People in the Media, loves the least of us. Who is more maligned, more ignored and downtrodden than Black disabled people? Leroy’s love is fierce and uncompromsing. He roars like a lion on behalf of his pride: ‘I am here! I am worthy! My life matters!'”

And Wanda Coleman, one of America’s foremost African American poets, one of the great poets period, says:

“In the tradition of History’s word warriors, Leroy Moore pens full-frontal confrontations that blast away the last nasty vestiges of Faith-based America’s biases against the poor, the disarranged and the different.”

“Tongo Eisen-Martin’s syntax lands somewhere between Sphinx and Thelonious…through poem he makes spare, efficient, wild-eyed jazz…rubs mud and accountability into the pores of the zeros and ones in the glass and steel city. Throughout SOMEONE’S DEAD ALREADY, I return to the wonder of the writer’s economy of language, how deftly the words infuse their amulet casings with blood temperature at the edge of boiling. This work is as hungry as a revolution, a necessary, deadly still in these shifting times…”—Marc Bamuthi Joseph

It has just been announced that Tongo Eisen-Martin has won the American Book Award for 2018 for his poetry collection, Heaven is All Goodbyes, City Lights Pocket Poets #61.

An open mic follows the featured readers.

Bird & Beckett’s 1st & 3rd Mondays poetry readings have been hosted by troubadour Jerry Ferraz for well over a decade. In 2018, he’s been joined in this role, and in curating the series, by San Francisco’s Poet Laureate, Kim Shuck.

Kim and Jerry are both native to San Francisco’s Eureka Valley, and have decades of experience taking in the City’s living culture from a ground-level view.