Independent reporter Denise Sullivan brings the SF Lives series to Bird & Beckett for a Sunday morning livestream. This month’s guest is Dee Allen, launching his 10th volume of poetry, The Mansion: Liberated Zones Inside The Controlled Inner City (Gnashing Teeth Publishing).”Named in honour of his first real home in the Bay Area, The Mansion covers Allen’s first five years surviving homelessness in San Francisco by squatting numerous buildings, whether long-abandoned or new ones under construction.”

Allen is an African-Italian performance poet based in Oakland, California. Active in creative writing & Spoken Word since the early 1990s, he’s the author of 10 books–Boneyard, Unwritten Law, Stormwater, Skeletal Black, Elohi Unitsi, Rusty Gallows: Passages Against Hate, Plans, Crimson Stain, Discovery and his newest, The Mansion–with 78 anthology appearances under his figurative belt so far.

The SFLives Project, a series of candid conversations with San Francisco’s artists, activists and free thinkers, was conceived as a print media column by Denise Sullivan for the San Francisco Examiner where it ran from 2018-2022, then transitioned into a live-streamed conversation, produced by Jenna Littlejohn, for Bird & Beckett. Past editions are archived on our YouTube channel.SF