4 Poets from the Writers Grotto!
This National Poetry Month, hear poems from a quartet of poets from the SF Writer's Grotto. Jenny Qi will read from her debut collection Focal Point, accompanied by Maw Shein Win (Storage Unit for the Spirit House), Preeti Vangani (Mother Tongue Apologize), and Tonya Foster (A Swarm of Bees in High Court).
Attending poets: (list is subject to change up to and including the day of the event)
Preeti Vangani is a poet and writer from Mumbai, writing and teaching in the Bay Area. She is the author of Mother Tongue Apologize (2019), winner of the RL India Poetry Prize. Her work has been published in The Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, Cortland Review among other places. Preeti has received fellowships and support from UCross, Tin House, Napa Valley Writers' Conference and the California Center for Cultural Innovation. She has taught poetry with Youth Speaks and at the MFA program at University of San Francisco.
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Maw Shein Win’s poetry chapbooks are Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA/Commonwealth Projects) and Score and Bone. Invisible Gifts: Poems was published by Manic D Press in 2018. Win is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito, California (2016 - 2018). Her full-length poetry collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House was long listed for the PEN America Open Book Award, nominated for a Northern California Book Award for Poetry, and short listed for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance’s Golden Poppy Award for Poetry for 2021. She often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and was a Spring 2021 ARC Poetry Fellow at UC Berkeley. mawsheinwin.com
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Tonya M. Foster is a poet, essayist and Black feminist scholar. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os; and coeditor of Third Mind: Teaching Creative Writing through Visual Art. Her writing and research focus on poetry, poetics, ideas of place and emplacement, and on intersections between the visual and the written. She is a poetry editor at Fence Magazine and a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto. Forthcoming publications include poetry collections—Thingifications (Ugly Duckling Presse); a chapbook—AHotB; a 2-volume compendium on the Umbra Writers Workshop (Wesleyan University Press); and an anthology of experimental creative drafts (Nightboat Books). She holds the George & Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University.
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Jenny Qi is the author of Focal Point, winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award. Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships and support from Tin House, Omnidawn, Kearny Street Workshop, and the San Francisco Writers Grotto. Born in Pennsylvania to Chinese immigrants, she grew up mostly in Las Vegas and Nashville and now lives in San Francisco, where she completed her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology. She is working on more essays and poems and translating her late mother’s memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and immigration to the U.S.