No charge.

Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of Leaving Tulsa, (2013) and Bright Raft in the Afterweather (2018), both published by the University of Arizona Press. She earned her PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver and her MFA from the Vermont College of the Fine Arts. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Jennifer teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA Low-Residency Program and co-directs For Girls Becoming, an arts mentorship program for Mvskoke youth in Oklahoma. Of Jen’s latest book of poetry, “Bright Raft in the Afterweather,” Joy Harjo says,

“We are adrift in mythic waters that hold the possibility of rebirth even as they float the remains of human destruction. We could be in San Francisco, within the mythos of a painter’s creation, or walking a Greek island with time. Wherever we are in the poems, islands rise up of tremendous linguistic beauty, rendering hope from songs. The book is a bird flown free in the power of the winds.”

Andrea Wolper is a New York-based jazz vocalist, songwriter and poet. In her ongoing “Cento” project, she combines music, poetry, and texts in a number of different ways, from poems set to music, to songs inspired by literature, to poems and texts “scored” to written and improvised music. As a jazz singer, she has performed in New York at The Blue Note, Dizzy’s, Birdland, the NY JVC Jazz Festival , 55 Bar, Cornelia Street Cafe, Arts for Art Evolving and In Gardens Series, and she appears at clubs and in festivals in the U.S. and abroad . Her California credits include Jazz on the Plazz, Cafe Stritch, California Jazz Conservatory, Dizzy’s San Diego, the Blue Whale, Red Poppy Art House, and more.

Jerry Ferraz and San Francisco Poet Laureate Kim Shuck co-host.

An open mic follows the featured readers.