Chinese American revolutionary feminist poet Nellie Wong, a Glen Park resident, grew up in Oakland’s Chinatown and came of age working in her parents’ restaurant there. Tracked into a working class path and following business classes at Oakland High School, she went to work as a secretary at Bethlehem Steel. In her 30s, in the late 1960s, Nellie enrolled at San Francisco State University, taking creative writing, ethnic studies and feminist studies classes and joining the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women, lifelong associations that continue to this day. Her development as a poet and her dedication to the struggle for radical social change took on a focused momentum in those years at San Francisco State which has continued for five decades.  In her mid-80s, in tribute to her engagement in poetry and political struggle, students at Oakland High successfully petitioned for a building at the school to be named for her.

Nellie celebrated her 90th birthday on September 12th, and has just published a new collection of poems, Nothing Like Freedom, available now at Bird & Beckett. She’ll read from the book, along with a few poems written along the way, on November 6th at the bookshop.

“These poems are the work of a steady hand, so many wonderful lines that take you to unexpected places. I will leave them for you to discover, this collection is a treasure.” –KIM SHUCK, 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco Emerita; Author of “Pick a Garnet to Sleep In” 

Listen to an interview at this link for a good take on Nellie’s development as a writer and a revolutionary activist.

Nellie’s first book, Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park (Kelsey Street Press) was published in 1977, followed by The Death of Long Steam Lady (West End Press, 1986). Stolen Moments, a chapbook, was published in 1997. Prior to the current release, her most recent collection was Breakfast Lunch Dinner (Meridian Press Works, 2012). Her poems have appeared widely in periodicals and anthologies including those of The Revolutionary Poetry Brigade and Moonstone Press, among others, and one of her poems was published in 2023 on The American Academy of Poets’ Poem-a-Day webpage.

In 2022, Nellie Wong received PEN Oakland’s Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award.

Nellie lives just up the street from Bird & Beckett. She’s a frequent reader in the store, as well as an avid reader of books she buys here. She also brings us each issue of Freedom Socialist as it’s published. Check it out! We believe that good newspapers will never completely go away, but they must be nurtured and read or the good they do will have less than the needed effect in the ongoing struggle for decency and progress. The freedom we enjoy is nothing like the freedom that we could and should have.