Mark your calendars for some readings in our Visiting Writers Series!

We have a robust schedule of visiting writers this semester and will be updating this post!

Join us for our first reading in our spring Visiting Writers Series! Professor Xochiquetzal Candelaria will host poet Joseph Lease for an online reading!

Wednesday, March 5, 2025, 1:30-2:30 PM

Zoom Meeting ID: 893 1181 3522

Joseph Lease’s critically acclaimed books of poetry include Fire Season (Chax Press, 2023), The Body Ghost (Coffee House Press, 2018), Testify (Coffee House Press, 2011), and Broken World (Coffee House Press, 2007). Lease’s seventh book of poems, Now What, winner of the Philip Whalen Award, will be published by Chax Press in 2026. Lease’s poems “‘Broken World’ (For James Assatly)” and “Send My Roots Rain” were anthologized in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. Lease is a Professor of Writing and Literature at California College of the Arts.

Join us for our second reading in our spring Visiting Writers Series! Professor Maggie Harrison will host novelist, poet, and screenplay writer Fabienne Josaphat for a hybrid reading!

Monday, March 10, 2025, 1:10-2:15 PM

Hybrid event,

Zoom ID: 822 2987 5692

Viewing at Ocean Campus, Multi-Use Building (MUB) Room 140

Fabienne Josaphat was born and raised in Haiti, and graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University. Of her first novel, Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow published with Unnamed Press, Edwidge Danticat said, “Filled with life, suspense, and humor, this powerful first novel is an irresistible read about the nature of good and evil, terror and injustice, and ultimately triumph and love.” In addition to fiction, Josaphat writes non-fiction and poetry, as well as screenplays. Her work has been featured in The African American Review, The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, The Master’s Review, Grist Journal, Damselfly, Hinchas de Poesia, Off the Coast Journal and The Caribbean Writer. Her poems have been anthologized in Eight Miami Poets, a Jai-Alai Books publication. Fabienne Josaphat lives in South Florida.

Kingdom of No Tomorrow is the Winner of the 2023 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.

This one is during class!

Join us for our third reading in our spring Visiting Writers Series! Professor John Isles will host poet Barbara Jane Reyes for an in-person reading!

Thursday March 20, 2025, 6-7 PM

Mission Campus, Room 109

1125 Valencia St. 

A longtime Bay Area Pinay author and educator, Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003), Poeta en San Francisco (TinFish Press, 2005), Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010), To Love as Aswang (Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc., 2015), Invocation to Daughters (City Lights Publishing, 2017), Letters to a Young Brown Girl (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2020), and Wanna Peek Into My Notebook?: Notes on Pinay Liminality (Paloma Press, 2022).

Please join us for our fourth reading in our spring Visiting Writers Series! To kick off National Poetry Month, professor and poet Xochiquetzal Caldelaria will host poet Luviette Resto for a reading!

Monday April 7, 2025

1:30-2:30 PM

Free virtual event!

Zoom Meeting ID: 854 7363 1238

Luivette Resto is an award-winning poet, a mother of three revolutionary humans, and a middle school English teacher. She was born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico, and was proudly raised in the Bronx, New York. She is a CantoMundo and Macondo Fellow. Her books of poetry include Unfinished Portrait (2008) and Ascension (2013), both published by Tía Chucha Press, as well as Living on Islands Not Found on Maps (FlowerSong Press, 2022). Her work has been mentioned in the LA Times and Ms. Magazine, and her work has been published in North American Review. Resto is the associate editor of Tía Chucha Press, and she serves on the boards of Women Who Submit and Beyond Baroque. She lives in the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles.

Please join us for the fifth reading in our spring Visiting Writers Series! Professor Steven Mayers will host the third annual Mission Poetas reading featuring poetas Lourdes Figueroa, Josiah Luis Alderete, and Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta!

Tuesday, April 8, 2025  

10:30 AM to 12 PM

CCSF’s Mission Campus

1125 Valencia Street, Room 109

Lourdes Figueroa is a queer chicanx oral poet based in SF whose work is a dialogue of her lived experience when her family worked in el azadón—tilling of the soil under the blistering sun. She is the author of the chapbooks yolotl, Ruidos =Learn Speak and Vuelta. She is a recipient of Nomadic Press Bay Area Literature Award for Poetry. Forthcoming later this year thru the Universidad Autónoma De Nuevo Leon in Mexico is her long verse poem I will kiss your mouth b/w the overgrown Milpa. Discover her latest poems in the Mexican Journal Tierra Adentro & latest poetry film Las Marimacha Fragments made in collaboration with Filmmaker Peggy Peralta within 3rd Thing’s Press A Good Symptom: A Serial Anthology of Time Based Disturbances. Lourdes celebrates your pocha marimachita tongue. A native of limbo nation, she continues to believe in your lung & your throat.

Josiah Luis Alderete is a full blooded Pocho spanglish speaking poeta who has been an active part of La Area Bahia’s Spoken Word scene for over twenty years. He was one of the founding members of outspoken word group The Molotov Mouths and is the curator and host of the long running monthly Latinx reading series Speaking Axolotl. His book of poems Baby Axolotls & Old Pochos was published in 2021 by Black Freighter Press. Currently he tends the 24th street portal as one of the owners of Medicine For Nightmares Bookstore & Galeria and resides in North Richmond where he is waiting for Quetzalquatl to arrive.

Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta was raised in Los Angeles, California by a family of single women, and grew up traveling and living across the western United States and Mexico with their mother, a cultural anthropologist. Their latest book is La Movida, published by Nightboat Books in 2022. Tatiana’s first book, The Easy Body, was published by Timeless, Infinite Light in 2017; their writing has appeared in SFMOMA Open Space and Wolfman New Life Quarterly. They live in a rent controlled apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco, around the corner from where they work as a barista at a pop and pop café video rental store hybrid and as a peer sexual health educator at CCSF’s Project SURVIVE.

Please join us for our sixth reading in our spring Visiting Writers Series! CCSF’s Poetry for the People, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Creative Writing Program present:

A very special poetry reading with

San Francisco Poet Laureate

Genny Lim

Wednesday, April 9, 2025

6-7:15 PM

Mission Campus, Room 109

Poet, playwright, performer, and activist Genny Lim, a second-generation daughter of Chinese immigrants, was born and raised in San Francisco’s Chinatown and North Beach neighborhoods. On September 6, 2024, Lim was appointed San Francisco’s ninth Poet Laureate by Mayor London Breed and is the first Chinese American poet to serve this role. Her writing, which centers the Asian American community, has been widely awarded and published.

Please join us for the seventh reading in our spring Visiting Writers Series! Professor Maggie Harrison will host a reading and discussion with writer and graphic memoirist Denali Sai Nalamalapu! They are a contributing writer to the anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua.

Thursday, April 10, 2025

12-1 PM | Hybrid Event

Mission Center 106

Zoom Meeting ID: 8336 0096 031

Denali Sai Nalamalapu (they/them) is the author of Holler: A Graphic Memoir of Rural Resistance. They are a climate organizer and comic artist living in Southwest Virginia, originally from Southern Maine and Southern India. Denali’s work uplifts the voices of those most impacted by climate change – rural, queer, and communities of color – through vibrant, engaging, and accessible illustrations and writing. Denali studied English Literature at Bates College and completed a Fulbright grant in Malaysia. Denali has worked as a climate communicator and organizer since 2019.

Please join us for the eighth reading in our spring Visiting Writers Series! Professor Maggie Harrison will host a reading and discussion with writer, digital storyteller, and activist Thelma Young Lutunatabua!

Wednesday, April 16, 2025

1-2PM | Hybrid Event

Rosenberg Library, Media Room 301

Zoom Meeting ID: 8311 8423 816

Thelma Young Lutunatabua is a digital storyteller and activist. With Rebecca Solnit, she is the co-editor of the book Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility and co-founder of the Not Too Late project. Lutunatabua currently works at The Solutions Project. Before that she’s worked in various roles supporting the global climate movement, as well as other human rights endeavors around the world. She calls Fiji and Texas home.