Doors at 7:30 pm; Show at 8:00 pm
Tickets are $17 Advance / $20 at the Door
Water Songs
At this challenging time, we appear to be a society on fire; promoting conflict as a response to strife. It is time to fight the fire not with more fire, but with the healing power of water.
Join us as we welcome six women poets as they honor water and its ability to cleanse, connect and reconcile our community.
They are:
Avotcja Jiltonilro… pronounced Avacha is a card-carrying New York born Music fanatic/sound junkie & popular Bay Area Radio DeeJay & member of the award winning group Avotcja & Modúpue. She’s a lifelong Musician/Writer/Educator/Storyteller & is on a shamelessly Spirit Driven Melodic Mission to heal herself. Avotcja talks to the Trees & listens to the Wind against the concrete & when they answer it usually winds up in a Poem or Short Story.
Avotcja has been published in English & Spanish in the USA, Mexico & Europe, and in more Anthologies than she remembers. She is an award winning Poet & multi-instrumentalist who has opened for Betty Carter in New York City, Peru's Susana Baca at San Francisco’s Encuentro Popular & Cuba’s Gema y Pável, played with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Bobi & Luis Cespedes, John Handy, Sonido Afro Latina, Dimensions Dance Theater, Black Poets With Attitudes, Bombarengue, Nikki Giovanni, Los Angeles' Build An Ark, Dwight Trible, Diamano Coura West African Dance Co., Terry Garthwaite, Big Black, The Bay Area Blues Society & Caribeana Etc. Shared stages with Sonia Sanchez, Piri Thomas, Janice Mirikitani, Diane DiPrima, Michael Franti, Jayne Cortez, & with Jose Montoya's Royal Chicano Air Force. Avotcja was the opening act for the legendary Poet Pat Parker the last three years of her life. She both composed & performed the film score for the Danish documentary MuNu. Her Poetry &/or music has been recorded by Piri Thomas, Famoudou Don Moyé (of The Art Ensemble Of Chicago), Bobby Matos Latin Jazz Ensemble, & performed by The Purple Moon Dance Project, and was the 1st Poetry performed by New York's Dance Mobile. She's appeared at The Lorraine Hansberry Theater in S. F., The Asian-American Jazz Festival in Chicago, as well as The Asian-American Jazz Festival in San Francisco. She's been featured 5 times at Afro-Solo, twice at San Francisco's Carnival, The Scottish Rite Temple & Yoshi's in Oakland & San Francisco, Jose Castellar's play "Man From San Juan", Club Le Monmartre in Copenhagen Denmark, Stanford University, at San Francisco’s Brava Theater For The Arts with Cine Acción, New York's Henry Street Settlement Theater and The Women On The Way Festival in San Francisco. Avotcja is a Bay Area award winning icon.
E.K. Keith has published poetry in journals and anthologies from coast to coast to coast. her San Francisco poetry performance venues include the Randall Museum, SF State Poetry Center, the Beat Museum, the Haight St Fair, and the 16th and Mission BART Plaza. Video of her performances are in the SF State Poetry Center archive and on the Internet. Articles about her are in the SF Weekly, SF 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.
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, Hercegovina, collaborating with musicians that include Max Roach, Jon Jang, Francis Wong and in recent collaborations with Ojala, 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. Sheʻs 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, from Merced College Press. She is also co-editor, along with the late Francisco X. Alarcón, of the prize-winning anthology Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice, The University of Arizona Press, 2016. 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 on-line media.
Kim Shuck is a Tsalagi (Cherokee)/Euro-American poet, author, weaver, and bead work artist who draws from Southeastern Native American culture and tradition as well as contemporary urban Indian life. She was born in San Francisco, California and belongs to the northern California Cherokee diaspora. She is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She earned a B.A. in Art (1994), and M.F.A. in Textiles (1998) from San Francisco State University. Her basket weaving work is influenced by her grandmother Etta Mae Rowe and the long history of California Native American basket making.
She has taught American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University and was an artist in residence at the de Young Museum in June 2010 with Michael Horse.
On June 21, 2017, Mayor Ed Lee named Kim as the 7th poet laureate of San Francisco.
