Doors at 7:30 pm; Show at 8:00 pm
Tickets are $15 advance / $20 day of performance
The whole world of poetry in one night: Ashkenaz and Women Drummers International celebrate Women’s History Month with our March series of special concerts and workshops, the Maestra Series, featuring women musicians, dancers, and poets from around the world. The nights are filled with inspired culture, singing, dancing, drumming, performers in new groupings, once-only collaborations, and reunions of pioneering women musicians.
Women, Poetry, and Power is a night of women’s poetry featuring a culturally wide-ranging program from Kim Shuck, Avotcja Jiltonilro, Genny Lim, Jolaoso Pretty Thunder, Odilia Galván Rodríguez, and E.K. Keith.
Kim Shuck has been telling stories and making things with beads for so long that even her parents don’t know when it all started. She has an MFA in textiles, has provided cover art for three books of poetry in the last year, and her beadwork is danced from North Carolina to Burbank during the pow wow season. Kim’s writing has earned a number of awards, one of which, the then Diane Decorah award, led to her first solo book of poems, “Smuggling Cherokee.” Shuck is a four-time Pushcart nominee. Her most recent collection of poems is “Clouds Running In.”
Avotcja (pronounced Avacha) Jiltonilro is a card-carrying New York-born music fanatic-sound junkie and popular Bay Area radio host (her “Bebop, Cubop & the Musical Truth” airs Tuesdays on KPFA-FM). She is often seen onstage creating poetry with a band of the Bay Area’s best musicians from around the world accompanying her: Avotcja & Modúpue. She is a lifelong musician-writer-educator-storyteller and is on a shamelessly Spirit-driven melodic mission to heal herself. An award-winning poet and multi-instrumentalist, she has shared stages around the country with musicians and fellow poets; an array of musicians have used her poetry in their own music and performance, from Piri Thomas to Bobby Matos. Avotcja has been featured at events from Afro-Solo to San Francisco’s Carnaval, Club Le Montmartre in Copenhagen, Denmark, and New York’s Henry Street Settlement Theater, among other significant sites. Shehas been given the Berkeley Poetry Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Berkeley City Council named May 10, 2014, as Avotcja Jiltonilro Day.
Genny Lim is the current Jazz Poet Laureate of San Francisco. A native San Francisco poet, playwright, and performer, she has performed throughout the U.S. and at international poetry festivals in Venezuela, Italy, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, collaborating with musicians including Max Roach, Jon Jang, Francis Wong, and, recently Ojalá featuring Obatala in “1945: A Day of Infamy” and a re-imagining of Max Roach’s seminal classic, “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.” Lim’s published poetry collections include” Child of War,” “Paper Gods and Rebels,” and the soon to be released “Kra!” Her award-winning play “Paper Angels,” first broadcast on American Playhouse in 1985, was reprised in the Seattle Fringe Festival 2016. She is co-author of “Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island.”
Jolaoso Pretty Thunder is a common earth-woman. She lives in the woods of Northern California with her family and two dogs Rosie Farstar and Ilumina Holy Dog. She’s a practitioner and student of herbal medicine (Western, Vedic, TCM, and Lukumi). She is also an ordained minister of the First Nations Church and founder of The Cloud Women’s Dream Society. She is a well-traveled though reluctant poet who loves Southern rock, porch swings, pickup trucks, cooking, campfires, lightning, steak, gathering and making medicine, and singing with friends and family.
Odilia Galván Rodríguez, poet-activist, writer, and editor, is the author of five volumes of poetry. Her latest is a collaboration with photographer Richard Loya, “The Nature of Things.” She is also co-editor, along with the late Francisco X. Alarcón, of the prize-winning 2016anthology “Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice.” She has worked as the editor for several magazines, most recently at Tricontinental Magazine in Havana, Cuba, and Cloud Women’s Quarterly Journal online. She facilitates Empowering People Through Creative Writing workshops nationally. Galván Rodriguez is also the administrator for Poets Responding to SB 1070 and Love and Prayers for Fukushima, both Facebook pages dedicated to bringing attention to social justice issues that affect the lives and well-being of many people. Her poetry and short fiction has been widely anthologized in creative writing collections and literary journals, in print and online media.
E.K. Keith has published poetry in journals and anthologies from coast to coast. Her San Francisco poetry performance venues include the Randall Museum, S.F. State Poetry Center, the Beat Museum, the Haight Street Fair, and the 16th & Mission BART Plaza. Video of her performances are in the SF State Poetry Center archive and on the Internet. She has been featured in SF Weekly, the San Francisco Examiner, and France’s Le Monde. She is one of the founding organizers of Poems Under the Dome, an annual celebration of National Poetry Month inside San Francisco’s City Hall.
