Kathryn Waddell Takara, visiting from Hawaii
& celebrating the release of her new collection Seasons in Haiku,
will read this evening together with Bay Area poets Karla Brundage,
Lucille Lang Day, Shizue Seigel, Amos White and, Maw Shein Win

If you’re unable to make it down to Bird & Beckett this evening,
you can view the live stream on the store’s YouTube channel or Facebook page.
Donations appreciated to support the poets and the stream.
60% of your donation will be shared with the poets; 40% will support the streaming expenses.
Information on how to donate will be found on the video screen
There’s also a link at the top of this website.
View the reading here:
YouTube              Facebook

_________________________

Kathryn Takara is an Afro-futurist, eco-poet, and warrior for social justice. She has published 11 books of poetry, most recently Seasons in Haiku. With a long career of community organizing, she is a recipient of the many prestigious awards including The American Book Award, for her book, Collected Poems; The History Makers National Award; the Black Futures Award; and a Life-Time Achievement (NAACP) award, and was Knighted in Honolulu into the Orthodox Order of St. John.

She was a pioneer in spoken word poetry in Hawaii, often accompanied by music and dance and paving the way for Hawaii’s current upsurge in spoken word and poetry. She has produced and performed in hundreds of poetry events in the islands, on the mainland and abroad in Africa and China and had sponsored widely acclaimed poets at conferences that she has organized and/or co-sponsored at the University of Hawaii.

In 1971, after co-founding and teaching Black Studies, a branch of Ethnic Studies, at the University of Hawaii, Kathryn Waddell Takara PhD, retired from 30 years as a professor there, leaving her mark on generations of students.

Her groundbreaking research includes many oral histories on Blacks in Hawaii including the inventor Alice Augusta Ball as well as former Civil Rights Activist, poet and labor activist Frank Marshall Davis. She has presented her work in lectures, academic journals, museums and galleries. During Covid, she has been able to participate in many national and international online readings.

Karla Brundage is a poet, editor, essayist, activist, performer, teacher and beach lover. As it happens, she’s also Kathryn Takara’s daughter. A recipient of a Fulbright Teacher Exchange she spent a year teaching in Zimbabwe and three years on Cote d’Ivoire where she founded West Oakland to West Africa Poetry Exchange. She is author of two books of poetry, Swallowing Watermelons and Mulatta-Not so Tragic, co-authored with Allison Francis. She has performed her work onstage and online, both nationally and internationally. Her poetry, short stories and essays can be found in Essential Truths, Multi-America, Konch, Hip Mama, sPARKLE & bLINK, Bamboo Ridge Press, Vibe. In 2020, her poem Alabama Dirt was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Lucille Lang Day is the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place and Becoming an Ancestor. She is also the editor of Poetry and Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery, coeditor of Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California and Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California, and author of two children’s books and a memoir. Her many honors include the Blue Light Poetry Prize, two PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Awards, the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, and eleven Pushcart nominations. She is founder and publisher of Scarlet Tanager Books. https://lucillelangday.com

Shizue Seigel is a Japanese American writer, visual artist, and director of Write Now! SF Bay, which supports writers and artists of color. Her extended family lost everything when they were incarcerated during World War II, and she grew up in segregated Baltimore, Occupied Japan, and California skid rows and sharecropping camps. She is a Jefferson Award winner, the recipient of multiple San Francisco Arts Commission Artist grants, and a VONA/Voices fellow. She has written or edited eight books including Uncommon Ground: Living Creatively while BIPOC, coming in October.

Amos White is an American haiku poet and author, producer and activist, recognized for his vivid literary imagery and breathless poetic interpretations. He was awarded for his haiku poetry in The Witt Review, and a finalist in the NPR National Cherry Blossom Haiku Contest in 2013. He is author of The Sound of the Web: Haiku and Poetry on Facebook and Twitter (2012). His works have appeared in The Wittenberg Review, Oakland Review, Bones Journal, Love is The Drug & Other Dark Poems (Red Light Lit), Sparkle and Blink, San Francisco BayView, Area 17 and the World Haiku Association Anthology. An arts impresario, Amos founded and hosts the Heart of the Muse creative’s salon, Beyond Words: Jazz+Poetry show and the Oakland Haiku and Poetry Festival.

Maw Shein Win’s most recent volume of poetry is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn), nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance’s Golden Poppy Award for Poetry.  Win’s previous collections include Invisible Gifts (Manic D Press); her chapbooks include “Ruins of a glittering palace” (SPA) and “Score and Bone” (Nomadic Press). She was the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito (2016-2018). She often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and was a Spring 2021 ARC Poetry Fellow at UC Berkeley. mawsheinwin.com

 

 

 

If you can’t find your way to the shop this evening,
a live stream can be found on the Bird & Beckett
YouTube channel or Facebook page.