Cookies, tea, and some plum wine
Poetry Reading with LaborFest features and an open mic.
About this Event
Open mic before and after the featured poets. Sign up at 3 pm.
LaborFestWriters
Writing by and for working people since 2005
Who We Are:
"The corporate-controlled media amplifies the voices of the powerful and diminishes the voices of working people. We are dedicated to overcoming that."
The LaborFest Writers grew out of a single afternoon in July 2005 — a writing workshop at the Exit Theatre in San Francisco's Tenderloin, led by labor writer Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Eight or nine people sat around a few tables in a dark little café and wrote about their first jobs. By the end of the day they had agreed to exchange email addresses.
Twenty years later, the group still meets — now weekly on Zoom, since the pandemic. We are rabble-rousers, activists, leftist radicals, union members, immigrants, native-born and plain old trouble-makers — outside the literary mainstream and committed to staying there. Our writing spans memoir, fiction, and poetry.
This is an unfinished and marvelous history.
From Our History:
"Roxanne had told us that everyone has the capability to tell a story and write it down — that it is a basic human ability, like singing and dancing... We found strength and power in gathering every second Saturday to read our work, discuss it, and expose it to peers — for their perusal and reflection."
— Keith David Cooley, LaborFest Writers History
Parking tip:
$8 all-day parking at St. Mary’s Square Garage.
Event venue & nearby stays
Clarion Performing Arts Center, 2 Waverly Place, San Francisco, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.