OPEN MIC THURSDAYS continue. Join us online for the second part of an All-Star edition of the MoAD Open Mic series. Launched in April 2018, MoAD Open Mic has been a platform for stellar poets and artists from around the Bay Area and beyond. To continue the momentum of the first edition of Open Mic All-Stars, join host Nia McAllister for an evening of spoken word showcasing a phenomenal lineup of past featured poets located all over the globe.

Featured poets include: Alie Jones, Avotcja, Danyeli Rodriguez Del Orbe, Joshua Merchant, Jubi Arriola-Headley, K. Eltiné, Michael Warr, Noel Quiñones, Norm Mattox, Raina J. León, Raymond Nat Turner, shah noor hussein, Tanea Lunsford Lynx, Thea Matthews, and Tureeda Mikell.

Register in advance to attend the virtual event: https://moadsf-org.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUvduGvrj4sGdA8q-qmGZNhj_nsDsjMWXsj

Donations of any amount are always welcome, so if you are able to, please consider donating to MoAD online HERE, or donating through Give by Cell by texting the word: MOADSF to the number: 56512 on your cell phone, then follow the link provided to make a donation. All donations will go towards supporting MoAD and continuing to bring you engaging programming.

‍Featured Poets

ALIE JONES is a self-care advocate, writer, artist, and Creole mermaid. Currently pursuing a Masters in Creative Writing and Literature at Mills College. She is the Director and Cofounder of Black Freighter Press, a revolutionary press committed to the exploration of liberation, using art to transform consciousness.

Her podcast called Chit Chat with Aliecat explores self-care practices and journeys of self-love in community.

AVOTCJA POET/PLAYWRIGHT/MULTI-PERCUSSIONIST/PHOTOGRAPHER/TEACHER Avotcja has been published in English & Spanish in the USA, Mexico & Europe. She’s an award winning Poet & multi-instrumentalist. She’s a popular Bay Area DJ & Radio Personality & leader of the group “Avotcja & Modúpue” (The Bay Area Blues Society’s Jazz Group Of The Year in 2005 & 2010).

Avotcja teaches Creative Writing & Drama & is a proud member of DAMO (Disability Advocates Of Minorities Org.), PEN Oakland, Local 1000 American Federation of Musicians & an ASCAP recording artist. Her latest Book is “With Every Step I Take” (Taurean Horn Press 2013.

‍AVOTCJA

DANYELI (pronounced Dan-Jelly) is a Dominican, Bronx-raised community organizer, writer, and spoken word performer. Her work raises awareness around issues of race, gender, and migration. She has been featured by Bronx Museum of Arts, People En Espanol Magazine, and became a 2020 recipient of the Define American Immigrant Artist Fellowship.

In December 2019, Danyeli self-published her first collection of poetry, periodicos de ayer, a lover’s archive. In addition, she is also the co-founder and co-host of loose accents, a Latinx podcast that highlights the immigrant experiences of the East and West coast.

JOSHUA A. MERCHANT is a native of East Oakland exploring what it means to grow and love in this country. Merchant has had the honor to be published as a finalist for the June Jordan Poetry Prize anthology ‘Walk These Streets’ in 2007, a collaboration with Alice Walker and OUSD. They have also been published in the literary journals Eleven Eleven, 580 Split’s 24th issue - ‘Push Black’, and Root Work Journal’s ‘Navigating The Ocean’ this year.

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JUBI ARRIOLA-HEADLEY (he/they) is a Blacqueer poet, a storyteller, a first-generation United Statesian (the son of Bajan immigrants), and author of the poetry collection original kink (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020). He’s a 2018 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, holds an MFA from the University of Miami, and has received support for his work from Millay Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Lambda Literary, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Jubi and his poems have been featured in Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Beloit Poetry Journal, Nimrod,  Southern Humanities Review, Washington Square Review, PBS NewsHour’s Brief But Spectacular, & elsewhere.

Jubi lives with his husband in South Florida, and his work explores themes of masculinity, vulnerability, rage, tenderness & joy.

Black Lives Matter. Trans Lives Matter. Stop Asian Hate. Art is Labor. Abolish Policing. Eat the Rich. Stay Kinky. Free Palestine.

K. ELTINAÉ is a Sudanese poet of Nubian descent, raised internationally as a third culture kid. His work has been translated into Arabic, Greek, Farsi, and Spanish and has appeared in World Literature Today, The Ordinary Chaos of Being Human: Many Muslim Worlds (Penguin), The African-American Review, About Place Journal, Muftah, among others. He is the first place poetry winner of Muftah´s Creative Writing Competition At Home in the World ()and co-winner of the 2019 Dignity Not Detention Prize from Poetry International.

His debut collection The Moral Judgement of Butterflies is forthcoming from Eyewear Press, Spring 2021 and won the The 2019 International Beverly Prize for  Literature. He currently resides in Granada, Spain.

More of his work can be found on Facebook and Instagram.

San Francisco poet MICHAEL WARR is a 2021 San Francisco Arts Commission Artist Grantee and 2020 Berkeley Lifetime Achievement Awardee. His books include Of Poetry & Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin (W.W. Norton), and The Armageddon of Funk and We Are All The Black Boy from Tia Chucha Press.  He is a San Francisco Library Laureate and recipient of a Creative Work Fund award for his multimedia project Tracing Poetic Memory, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature, Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award, Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poets Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

His poetry is translated into Chinese by poet Chun Yu as part of their “Two Languages / One Community” project. Among the translated poems is his serial poem “What Not To Do (an unfinished poem)” to be published in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, issue 46.2. Since 2018 he has been adding names to the poem of especially Black people unjustly killed by the police.

Michael is the former Deputy Director of the Museum of the African Diaspora and a board member of the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. Follow his creative work here.

NOEL QUIÑONES is a Puerto Rican writer, educator, performer, and community organizer from the Bronx. As a writer, he’s received fellowships from Poets House, the Poetry Foundation, CantoMundo, Tin House, Candor Arts, and SAFTA (Sundress Academy for the Arts). As a performer, he has featured at Lincoln Center, Harvard University, BAM, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, and the Honolulu Museum of Art.

His work has been published in POETRY, Green Mountains Review, the Latin American Review, Rattle, Kweli Journal, and elsewhere. He is the founder and former director of Project X, a Bronx-based arts organization, a poetry book reviewer for Muzzle Magazine, and a current M.F.A. candidate in poetry at the University of Mississippi.

Follow him online @noelpquinones.

NORM MATTOX is a retired educator living from New York. His poetry tells a story of love and resilience in these times of challenge, struggle and transformation. Norm has shared his poetry as a featured reader at open mics around the Bay Area and zoom spaces around the globe.

Norm has had poems published in the anthologies, Poetry in Flight/Poesía en Vuelo,The City is Already Speaking and Poetry in The Time of Coronavirus. Norm has a chapbook titled, 'Get Home Safe, Poems for Crossing the Community Grid’. Nomadic Press published his second chapbook of poetry titled, ‘Black Calculus' in February 2021.

RAINA J. LEÓN, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia.  She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education.

She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African-American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo, and Círculo de Poetas and Writers. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, and sombra: dis(locate) and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self.

She also is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She educates our present and future agitators/educators as a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California. If you want to teach, connect with her on the interwebs!

The Town Crier," RAYMOND NAT TURNER, is a NYC poet privileged to have read at the Harriet Tubman Centennial Symposium in Auburn, NY where he is considered a “Special Son.”  Turner is the artistic director of the stalwart JazzPoetry Ensemble, UpSurge! and has appeared at numerous festivals and venues including the Monterey Jazz Festival and Panafest in Ghana, West Africa.

He is Poet-in-Residence at Black Agenda Report. He is also a frequent contributor to Dissident Voice, Struggle, Monthly Review and other online and print publications. Turner has opened for luminaries such as James Baldwin, People’s Advocate Cynthia McKinney, movement sportswriter Dave Zirin, and CA Congresswoman Barbara Lee following her lone vote against attacking Afghanistan.

He describes himself as " a Cultural Worker my 97 year-old NYC mentor dubbed the “Town Crier;” and "I've always thought in terms of creating content in service of the struggle for social change...

SHAH NOOR is a writer, visual artist, and scholar crafting narratives at the nexus of Black feminist thought, Queer diaspora studies, and liberatory pedagogies. shah's poetry has been featured in the LA Review of Books (2020), Umber (2019), and CUNJUH (2017) as well as performed at the Museum of the African Diaspora (2020), Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (2018), and the African American Arts & Culture Complex (2018), to name a few.

shah has taught courses and led writing workshops at Stanford University (2020), Laney College (2019), and UC Berkeley (2018). They have served as a Writing Fellow at the California Institute of Integral Studies (2016 - 2017), a Teaching Fellow for the Peralta Community College System in Oakland (2018 - 2019), and a Pedagogy Fellow with the Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (2020 - 2021) at UC Santa Cruz.

shah’s cultural work aims to (re)center marginalized voices in dialogues on alternative epistemologies and cultural reproduction through a multimedia study of popular culture and women's music in their home country, Sudan. In their leisure, shah enjoys talking to their plants, doing yoga, and finding the best mocha lattes in Oakland.

You can follow shah on Instagram & Twitter: @shah__noor as well as Clubhouse: @shah_noor. SHAHNOORHUSSEIN.COM

TANEA LUNSFORD LYNX is a fourth-generation Black San Franciscan on both sides. Tanea is a writer, educator, and cultural worker. She leads the Spoken Arts Department at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts and teaches Social justice and Ethnic Studies classes at City College of San Francisco.

She is at work on her second book, a work of creative nonfiction.

You can find her work online at tanealunsfordlynx.com.

THEA MATTHEWS  is a poet, author, and educator originally from San Francisco, California. Her debut poetry collection Unearth [The Flowers] is listed as part of Kirkus Reviews’s Best Indie Poetry of 2020. Some of her work has appeared in The New Republic, Atlanta Review, the Rumpus, and others. Currently, Thea lives in Brooklyn and is a MFA poetry candidate at New York University.

She is a Donald Everett Axinn Fellow at the Academy of American Poets.

www.theamatthews.com

Named, Story Medicine Woman, award-winning poet, called an activist for holism hell-bent on asserting life, DJele Musa, aka woman of truths. TUREEDA MIKELL is a ChiGong energy consultant over 36 years.  Has been a Poets in the School poet teacher for over 30 years, and was Area Coordinator for Alameda County Poets in the Schools for eleven years.

Writer for Rhodessa Jones, Medea Project, for Women’s Prison work.  U. C. B. Bay Area Writing Project Summer Fellow Wrote Poetry into Policy in 1996.   Appointed U. C. Berkeley delegate to the International Writing Project/Writing for the Urban Child, Denver, Colorado 2008.

Scholastic poetry judge, U. C. Berkeley BAWP-Bay Area Writing Project 2011-13. Poetry Out Loud Judge, Youth Speaks Judge, Oakland Youth Poet Laureate Judge.  

Published 72 student anthologies including at-risk youth from throughout the East and West Bay Area, Hunter’s Point, and S.F. Western Addition including the Wajumbe Cultural Institution. Was NuWa poet/storytelling delegate in Beijing, China with Eth Noh Tec International in 2018. Octavia Butler’s 70 Birthday at Red Bay, the de Young Museum’s, Soul of a Nation, Afrofuturism, and Wall and Response unveiling.

Tureeda’s work has been chosen for the 2021 Harlem Book Fair, in N.Y., and the 55 Year celebration of the Unveiling of Black Panther Party Mural, by Refa Senay.  Online zine publications include, The Maynard, 2020, Poetry is Bread, 2021, Word Press/Digital Papers 2021, Warmth of Oakland Sun, 2021 and Published in Building Socialism II. June 2021.  Her book, Synchronicity, The Oracle of Sun Medicine, was released 2/2020, and was nominated for the California Book Award.  

She is co-curator of the Patrice Lumumba Anthology, with East Side Arts Alliance, released January 2021, both published by Nomadic Press.‍

Funding has been provided by  California Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.