Friday, March 15, 2024
Ransom for Six Sky
Saturday, March 09, 2024
New 'zine! Raza for Gaza : Poets in solidarity with Palestine
Mo Sati, poet. |
For more info visit their Instagram page: @somosantifason
Camellia Boutros is a Palestinian-Lebanese American composer and multi-instrumentalist based in San Francisco. Having performed as a trumpet player with a diverse array of Bay Area world music projects, such as Mission Delirium, Alaturca Connection, Inspector Gadje, and Banda Sin Nombre, Camellia approaches the music she writes with a custom modified fretless 12-string electric guitar, enabling her to write and perform music using the quarter-tone Maqam system. Her music and lyrics defy genre definition, forming an experimental blend of rock, folk, Arab, jazz, and brass music, all of which can be found on her first solo album Refuge.
For more info: Camellia Boutros Music https://camelliaboutros.com/about/
Diana Gameros is a singer, guitarist, pianist, composer, songwriter, music instructor and social justice activist, based in San Francisco, California. She was born and raised in Ciudad Juárez, México and immigrated to the United States as a teenager to study music in Michigan. Over the last decade in the Bay Area she has released two albums of original songs written in Spanish and English, and Mexican classic songs. In 2014 Diana received the Emerging Leader Award by the Chicana/Latina Foundation. In 2015 she was named one of YBCA’s 100: creative minds, makers, and pioneers that are asking the questions and making the provocations that will shape the future of American culture. NPR Music gave Diana an honorable mention to Arrullo in best Latin albums of the year in 2017. Diana was named one of SF Magazine’s 100 Artists: Artists Putting The East Bay On The Map, in 2018.
For more info: https://www.dianagameros.com/epk
Leticia García is a poet and an immigrant woman from Oaxaca, Mexico, a single mother and a powerful leader in the community, with deep compassion for the suffering of other immigrant women.
Ayodele Nzinga, the first Poet Laureate of Oakland, is a multi-hyphenated artist; a brilliant actress, a producing director, playwright, poet, dramaturg, performance consultant, educator, and community advocate. She is the director of the Lower Bottom Playaz, Inc., Oakland’s oldest North American African Theater Company and founder of Lower Bottom Playaz Summer Theater Day Camp. Ayodele is co-founder of Janga’s House a Black Women Arts collective and a founding member of BlacSpace Collective. She is the Executive Director of the Black Arts Movement Business District Community Development Corporation (BAMBD CDC); and founder and producer of BAMBDFEST International Biennial, a month-long arts and cultural festival animating the Black Arts Movement Business District in Oakland CA. Nzinga holds an MFA in Writing and Consciousness; a Ph.D. in Transformative Education & Change; is a Cal-Shakes Artist Investigator Alumni; a San Francisco Foundation Arts Leadership Fellow; a member of the Alameda County Women’s Hall of Fame; recognized by Theater Bay Area as one of the 40 faces in the Bay that changed the face of theater in the Bay Area; is recognized by the August Wilson House as the only director in the world to direct the complete August Wilson American Century Cycle in chronological order; a YBCA 10 Fellow, a BIPOC Circle Fellow and a VOICES Community Journalism Fellow. Nzinga is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Oakland CA. Nzinga’s work for the stage has been reviewed internationally. Her blog is read in 81 countries. She is the author of Performing Literacy a Narrative Inquiry into Performance Pedagogy, The Horse Eaters, SorrowLand Oracle, and Incandescent and her work can be found in numerous journals and anthologies. Nzinga, a cultural anchor, is part theoretician and part partitioner. She describes herself as a cultural architect invested in creating structures for culture making.
For more info: Ayodele Nznga https://www.ayodelenzinga.com/about/Madeleine Zayas Born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Madeleine Zayas is a Latin American singer/interpreter, dancer and choreographer and architect based in Oakland. She was co-founder of Buena Trova Social Club in 2012 and lead singer and co-artistic director of Madelina y Los Carpinteros since 2014. Madeleine has performed in San Juan, Puerto Rico, many U.S. Cities, and Santiago, Chile, and has shared stage with Wilkins, Cheo Feliciano, Inti Illimani, John Santos and Holly Near. She believes in art and cultural activism as a positive force of communication and a tool for social change.
Fernando Feña Torres is a Chilean exile, musician, composer and poet, journalist and founding ex member of Grupo Raiz. Fena is an expert in folkloric multi-instrumentalist. He began his musical career as a young boy inspired by the socialist government of Salvador Allende A former political prisoner and exiled into the US, he has collaborated with Teatro Campesino and has performed in Bay Area and internationally along with artists such as David Byrne, Pete Seeger and Holly Near.
Daniel Oñate, is a highly qualified performer of piano, pianist, transverse flute and quena. He is also a composer, arranger and orchestra director from Southern Chile. He is a winner of the acclaimed Luis Advis contest, in the Chile Canta a Victor Jara version. He is currently completing a Masters in music at UC Berkeley.Listen to Made y Feña's new song for Gaza in Would You
Tuesday, January 30, 2024
Altars for our living Oakland: Mass shootings
Tuesday, October 06, 2020
Café solidario: Brew Zapatista coffee, drink solidarity without borders
1601 2nd Avenue
Oakland, CA
"A medium roast coffee with notes of apple and cinnamon. This coffee is sourced from Zapatista Communities in Chiapas, Mexico."
Monday, September 21, 2020
Earth Justice
Don't spare the human predators
Don’t spare the capitalists and their weapons
Don’t spare war and racism
Don’t spare the smokestacks and their e-industrialists...
[September 20, 2019]
Thursday, September 03, 2020
Five Questions
What were the best five lives,
the best five big bangs
the best five galaxies
the best five universes
the best five suns
the best five worlds
the best five centuries
the best five decades,
the best five years,
the best five months,
the best five days,
the best five hours,
the best five minutes,
the best five seconds
of a moment
of your family?
If you hear creaking mattresses
in the night of your home
is it ghosts or the orgasms
of unrequited lovers?
How many mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandma’s, grandpa’s, aunts, uncles
have given their lives
so that you may have a shot at happiness?
What happens to you
when you see old photographs
of your ancestors,
do you fall in love with them
or do you wish they could tell you their stories?
Do you know
your grandmother’s favorite colors,
her birthdate,
the name of her first boyfriend,
if she loved someone other than your grandfather
and never left?
Will you be like her,
give birth to twelve children
with a man she may not love?
Will your love be that strong to survive anguish and wars?
My grandmother taught me
that my success was the offspring
of 1000 relatives and ancestors
who failed,
who struggled,
who suffered
and only knew happiness
as a legacy she, he, they gave to me.
I carry the anguish of thousands in my bones,
I get to smile, laugh, be nourished, be hopeful,
because they had no happiness,
only disease, deaths, harsh work
and tender lovemaking that birthed dead or dying children.
All my ancestors are light as an orgasm,
as deep as my belly laughs,
as clear as my tears.
When my grandmother tried to choke to death her husband
she was trying to kill the woman she never became.
She was a woman who loved women,
who loved me,
who loved plants and seeds,
who took care of all children
– because no child could be illegitimate –
who only believed in horizons
and where the waterfalls were her prayer beads.
She said:
You will become a revolutionary of love,
a revolutionary to destroy solitudes,
to resurrect all the old ones who didn’t make it
because they harvested someone else’s crops,
tilled their lands for other people,
who were killed by work and hate,
whose love was never honored,
whose lives mattered because they, she, created more life and lives.
My grandmother said she did not have children so that they would be slaves.
She had children so that they would have lives, not hers, their own.
And she would live in us, in me,
in whatever life we chose
and she would be free, lazy, drinking coffee,
have more free time to debate Protestants
and make her body the theology of the future.
My grandmother made love, made children, made a new god of her body…
[September 2013 | Oakland, Califaztlán, Ohlone Territory]