Bird & Beckett hosts an open mic for poets on the first Thursday of each month, with two featured poets leading off at 7pm followed by the open at 8pm. Bring three minutes worth of poetry to read, or just come to enjoy the work of the poets! BYOB. No reservations required. Michael Koch and Jerry Ferraz host.

Tonight’s featured poets are Tehmina Khan and Florencia Milito.

Tehmina Khan is a community-based poet raised by immigrant scientists. She has spent her adult life writing, teaching, resisting, and mothering. Tehmina has taught science to preschoolers, citizenship to octogenarians, and poetry translation to elementary school students; now she teaches writing at UC Berkeley and Poetry for the People City College of San Francisco, where she defends everyone’s right to learn and to speak. Tehmina lives, writes, rides her bicycle, creates community, and loves on Ohlone lands, within a multigenerational family web.

Florencia Milito is a bilingual poet, writer, translator, and educator whose work is informed by her early experience fleeing Argentina’s 1976 coup. She lived for many years in the Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco, the city where her two daughters were born. She has published two short books of poetry, both bilingual. A few years ago, her family relocated to Davis, California. Strongly connected to the Bay Area, she misses the ocean and city, and seeks refuge in the trees, especially her golden ginkgo (árbol de la memoria).