In this weekly summer series, eight Bay Area poets share new poems created in response to the current exhibitions.  They will also describe the processes they employ in writing ekphrastic work.  Come and see, come and listen, come and experience the art that moves your spirit to consider power and liberation.‍

June 6 - August 1 feature individual performances.

‍These readings and discussions culminate in the MoAD Salon with an evening of wine and performance by all the poets in this series on August 8.

Community Voices: Poets Speak is curated by Raina J. León.

The exhibition on view is Coffee, Rhum, Sugar & Gold: A Postcolonial Paradox.

Coffee, Rhum, Sugar & Gold: A Postcolonial Paradox looks at the legacy of European colonialism in the Caribbean through the work of 10 contemporary artists. Whether connected to the Caribbean by birth or focused on the region by choice, the exhibiting artists use their work as a means of examining the relationship between the power structure, those who are controlled by it, those who benefit from it, and those who actively seek to liberate themselves from it. A key driver of the exhibition is the theory that colonialism has continued to exist in other forms, and is in fact spreading through the export of soft power, the use of military force, the control of international financial and banking mechanisms, as well as the increase in globalization.

Featured Poet

Tonya M. Foster

Just announced: Tonya has been chosen as one of MoAD's 2019 Poets-in-Residence!

‍Tonya M. Foster was raised in New Orleans, LA. She is an Assistant Professor of Writing & Literature, and of Graduate Writing at California College of the Arts. A poet and essayist, she is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna*, 2015), the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os (joca seria, 2016), and is a co-editor of Third Mind: Teaching Creative Writing through Visual Art (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2002).

She is currently a poetry editor at Fence Magazine, and a member of the poetry and fiction editing collective at The African-American Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Obsidian, Boundary2, Poetry Project Newsletter, the Harvard Review, Best American Experimental Writing, Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing, and elsewhere. Foster is a recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Macdowell Artists Colony, the Headlands Center, and New York Foundation for the Arts, among others.

She is currently working on A Mathematics of Chaos, a cross-genre collection that revolves around New Orleans, home, family, and displacement.

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Public programs at MoAD are supported in part by Target.