The next benefit: tonight! May 20th, 2023

BEAST CRAWL OF FAME ALL STARS @ INTERSECTION

 The Beast Crawl of Fame All Stars features Oakland Poet Laureate Dr. Ayodele Nzinga and SF Poet Laureate Emerita Kim Shuck as headliners in a heavyweight ticket that also features MK Chavez, Nazelah Jameson, Natasha Dennerstein, Reggie Edmonds, Kimi Sugioka, and Joel Landmine; the very best of East Bay poetry. Readers will perform over a lush layer of ambient blues kindly provided by lay/lie.

All ticket sales will go to support the Beast Crawl Literary Festival taking place July 22nd, 2023 in Downtown Oakland.

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Joel Landmine’s work has been described as sounding like “the diary of a sixteen-year-old-girl [sic] as written by a fortysomething hipster… imagining he's being real when actually he's a self-indulgent douche who's never allowed himself to understand shit," by an anonymous internet troll. However, retired bus driver Jon Nelson says he’s “pretty good.” His collections Yeah, Well…(2014) and Things Change (2021) available from Punk Hostage Press. He lives in Oakland with his wife and cats.  

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Nazelah Jamison is a Bay Area-based performance poet, author, actor, vocalist and emcee. Her first book of poetry, Evolutionary Heart, was released on Nomadic Press in 2016. Her work can also be found in The Racket Journal: Issue Fifteen (2020), Culture Counts Magazine (2021), La Raiz Magazine (2022),  Better Ancestors, Sparkle + Blink 115 (Quiet Lightning 2022) and others. In her spare time, Nazelah enjoys writing horror screenplays and saving the day. She hosts Thee Virtual Open Mic every 1st & 3rd Friday on zoom, and gives the best hugs in the Bay Area.

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​Natasha Dennerstein was born in Melbourne, Australia. She has an MFA from San Francisco State University and has had poetry published in many journals internationally. Her chapbook Broken: A Life of Aileen Wuornos in 33 poems was published in 2021 by Be About It Press. She lives in Oakland, California, where she is an editor at Nomadic Press and works at St James Infirmary, a clinic for sex-workers in San Francisco. She was a 2018 Fellow of the Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat.

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​MK Chavez is an Afro-Latinx writer, educator, multi-disciplinary artist, and curator. Chavez is co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival and co-founder and curator of Lyrics & Dirges and teaches and supports writers at Ouroboros Writing Lab. Chavez’ writing explores identity, social injustice, environmental degradation, horror cinema, magic, and ritual and has been recognized with a Pen Oakland Josephine Miles award, the San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award. She is a 2018 Alameda County Arts Leadership Award recipient and a 2023 YBCA 100 fellow. Her literary offerings include Dear Animal, Mothermorphosis, the lyric essay chapbook A Brief History of the Selfie, and Virgin Eyes. Chavez’s work can be found among the trees in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park through the Voices of the Trees Project.

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Reggie Edmonds the co-founder of Rich Oak Events which organizes the Oakland Poetry Slam, the Berkeley Poetry Slam, the Rich Oak Alchemy Open Mic, and Daydreamer’s Poetry. Their work has been selected for fellowships and awards from Nomadic Press, the Afro Urban Society, Shuffle Collective and others. Their work can be found in Rigorous Magazine, Foglifter Journal, and elsewhere. Their poem, Aerodynamics of the American Negro, was a finalist for the Red Wheel Barrow Poetry Prize in 2022. Currently, they can be found working as the Community Arts Partnership Manager at the RYSE Youth Center and as the coach of the 2023 Berkeley Poetry Slam Team. ig and twitter: @Reggiepoetry

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Kimi Sugioka, is a mother, educator, songwriter and poet. Her newest book is Wile & Wing on Manic D Press and she is the poet laureate of Alameda, CA. She loves cats and birds and believes that creating community through art is a revolutionary act.

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Kim Shuck writes things. Much of what Shuck writes these days are thumbnail autobiographies for the purpose of advertising books and shows. Shuck is author of ten books and editor, co-editor, assistant editor, coffee monkey, edit adjacent or edit curious for ten anthologies. Awards, degrees, reviews, boards of directors and all of the expected literary lint pertain. Shuck is the 7th Poet Laureate Emerita of San Francisco.

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​Ayodele Nzinga is a multi-hyphenated artist. She is the founder of Oakland's oldest Black Theater Company and the producer of BAMBDFEST, a biennial international arts festival, an actress, director, and producer. Nzinga's publications include Performing Literacy, The Horse Eaters, SorrowLand Oracle, and Incandescent. Her work appears in numerous journals and anthologies. She is the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Oakland, CA.

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