Grace Notes

Litquake’s diverse live programs are created with the aim of inspiring critical engagement with the key issues of the day, bringing people together around the common humanity encapsulated in literature, and perpetuating a sense of literary community, as well as a vibrant forum for Bay Area writing. We believe in literature as a public good, so we work to produce events that are accessible to all.Learn more atlitquake.org

Litquake, San Francisco's Literary Festival

Celebrate National Poetry Month at Grace Cathedral with James Cagney, Henri Cole, Jewelle Gomez, Jacques Raincourt, and Rachel Zucker.

Grace Cathedral

Join Litquake for our annual celebration of National Poetry Month. We’ll gather under the stunning stained glass of San Francisco&#x27;s historic Grace Cathedral while five celebrated poets read from their latest collections. Featuring words from James Cagney, Henry Cole, Jewelle Gomez, Jacques Rancourt, and Rachel Zucker. Book sales and signing to follow. Curated and hosted by D.A. Powell. FREE, $10-15 suggested donation (pre-registration required)James Cagney’s second poetry collection, Martian: The Saint of Loneliness is the winner of the 2021 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. His first, Black Steel Magnolias In The Hour Of Chaos Theory won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award in 2018. His work has appeared in Alta Magazine and Beat Not Beat Anthology co-edited by Kim Shuck. Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan to a French mother and an American father. He has published eleven collections of poetry and received many awards for his work, including the Jackson Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome prize, the Berlin Prize, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His has also published Orphic Paris, a memoir. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College.Jewelle Gomez is a writer and activist. She is the author of seven books. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry are included in over one hundred anthologies. She has written essays, as well as literary and film criticism for numerous publications including The Village Voice, MS Magazine, The Advocate, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Black Scholar. She sits on the poetry selection committees for the Commonwealth Club of California Book Awards; and for the San Francisco Poet Laureates. Jacques J. Rancourt is the author of Brocken Spectre (Alice James Books, 2021), Novena (Pleiades Press, 2017), and the chapbook In the Time of PrEP (Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018). A recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, his poems have appeared in AGNI, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Raised in Maine, he lives and teaches in San Francisco.Rachel Zucker is the author of ten books, most recently, The Poetics of Wrongness and SoundMachine. She is the founder and host of the podcast Commonplace.

Grace Notes

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Grace Notes

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