Grace Notes: Poetry at Grace Cathedral

Celebrate National Poetry Month with Litquake, the largest independent literary festival on the West Coast. Returning for our 9th year to this gloriously Gothic space, enjoy a special evening of exalted verse with poetry in the pews from a distinguished roster of poets. Curated and hosted by D.A. Powell and Preeti Vangani, four celebrated poets will share their work: Brenda Hillman, Cathy Park Hong, Dong Li, and Brian Tierney. A book sale and signing will follow the readings.

FREE, $5-10 suggested donation.

Brenda Hillman’s eleventh collection from Wesleyan University Press, In a Few Minutes Before Later, was published in 2023. A recent recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Hillman has edited and co-translated over twenty books. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Hillman lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she is Professor Emerita at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Cathy Park Hong’s New York Times bestselling book of creative nonfiction, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, was published in Spring 2020. Minor Feelings was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography, and earned her recognition on TIME’s 100 Most Influential People of 2021 list. She is also the author of poetry collections Engine Empire, published in 2012 by W.W. Norton, Dance Dance Revolution, chosen by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Translating Mo'um. Hong is the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is a Full Professor in English at UC Berkeley.

Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French, and German. Born and raised in China, he was educated at Deep Springs College and Brown University. He has received fellowships from Akademie Schloss Solitude, Camargo and Humboldt Foundations, MacDowell, PEN/Heim Translation Fund, Yaddo, and others. His debut poetry collection (The University of Chicago Press, 2023) was the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize. Li is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts for Spring 2024.

Brian Tierney is the author of Rise and Float (Milkweed Editions, 2022), winner of The Jakes Adam York Prize. A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University, his work has appeared in such publications as POETRY, Paris Review, NER, AGNI, Kenyon Review, and others. In 2013, he was named among Narrative Magazine’s “30 Below 30” emerging writers, and was the 2018 winner of the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Prize. He grew up in Philadelphia and currently lives in Oakland, where he teaches poetry at The Writing Salon.

Preeti Vangani grew up in Mumbai, India and is the author of the poetry collection Mother Tongue Apologize (2019), selected as winner of the RL Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, and Hobart, among other journals. She is the recipient of the 2022 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. An alumni of the program, she currently teaches at the MFA program at University of San Francisco.

D. A. Powell's books include Repast (Graywolf, 2014) and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf, 2012), the latter a recipient of the Northern California Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. His honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize, and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at University of San Francisco.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Grace Cathedral, 1100 California Street, San Francisco, United States