Booksmith hosts The Perfectly Queer reading series for their annual celebration of queerness at Pride Poetry Palooza! Eight amazing LGBTQ poets will read from new work and discuss queer poetic inspiration. Book signings follow. Free admission, free and delicious refreshments. Queer (and poetic) door prizes awarded at 7pm. More about Perfectly Queer here.
This year's featured poets are Susan Dambroff, Natasha Dennerstein, Michael Tod Edgerton, Europa Grace, Philip Harris, David Hathwell, Randall Mann, and Luna Merbruja!
Susan Dambroff is a poet, performer, and teacher. She has published two books of poetry: Conversations With Trees and Memory in Bone. Her poems have appeared in Stoneboat, Earth’s Daughters, and Red Bird Chapbooks, among other literary venues. She performs in Spoken Duets, a poetic and improvisational collaboration with Chris Kammler.
Natasha Dennerstein’s poetry has been published in Landfall, Shenandoah, Bloom, Red Light Lit, Spoon River Poetry Review, Foglifter, and North American Review. Her books include two collections (Anatomize and Triptych Caliform), her novella-in-verse About a Girl, and her trans chapbook Seahorse. More at www.natashadennerstein.com.
Michael Tod Edgerton is the author of Vitreous Hide and poems which have appeared in the Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, EOAGH, Five Fingers Review, New American Writing, and New Orleans Review, among other journals. Check out Tod’s ongoing participatory text and sound project at WhatMostVividly.com.
Europa Grace makes home in the spaces between breaths, speaking the body into movement as we bear our mutual vulnerability. Europa is a trauma informed yoga instructor; they have been teaching for six years. Her exploration of performance art is a call to reclaim space and voice utilizing modalities of BDSM, somatic awareness, ancestral healing, and afrofuturist ritual.
Philip Harris received his MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University in spring 2017. His first chapbook The Flowers in My Mothers' Name was recently published by Nomadic Press. His second, The Rock,s is forthcoming from Alleycat Bookstore. Philip is also the co-host and co-creator of the podcast “Queers in Space.”
David Hathwell published Between Dog and Wolf in 2017 and Muses, his debut poetry collection, in 2016. His poems have appeared in more than a dozen literary magazines. A former English teacher, he has degrees in English from Stanford and Columbia and a degree in music theory from CUNY.
Randall Mann, a three-time Lambda Literary Award finalist, is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Proprietary (Persea Books, 2017). His writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, Paris Review, and Poetry. He lives in San Francisco.
Luna Merbruja is a writer and filmmaker. They are the author of Heal Your Love and have short stories published in two Lambda Literary-nominated anthologies: The Resilience Anthology and Nerve Endings: The New Trans Erotic. They have written articles for Autostraddle, Everyday Feminism, and the next edition of Colonize This!