About this Event
Co-presented by Yerba Buena Night
We're back! Emceed by the incomparable Daniel Handler! Two teams of award-winning poets, including Sam Sax, Shelley Wong, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, and Rebecca Foust, take turns batting at topics pitched to them by the audience. Fastballs, curveballs, knuckleballs: these poets won't know what's coming next! Hilarity and stunning work guaranteed. Eminently qualified umpires, including D. A. Powell, will score each batter's reading, and the winning team takes the series title. Don't forget to bring a topic to stump the poets with! Book sale/signing follows the reading.
As Marianne Moore wrote, “Writing is exciting / and baseball is like writing. / You can never tell with either / how it will go.”
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Children of the Land: A Memoir (Harper Collins, 2020); Cenzontle (BOA editions, 2018), which was chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy as the winner of the 2017 A. Poulin, Jr. Prize; and Dulce (Northwestern University Press, 2018), winner of the Drinking Gourd Prize. He is a founding member of the Undocupoets, which eliminated citizenship requirements from all major poetry book prizes in the U.S., and was recognized with the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award. He lives in Northern California where he serves as the poet laureate of Yuba and Sutter Counties. He currently teaches at St. Mary’s College of California and the Ashland University Low-Res MFA program. Castillo will be guest editor of Poem-a-Day in October 2022.
Rebecca Foust was the Poet Laureate of Marin County and is the author of Paradise Drive and The Unexploded Ordnance Bin, released November 2019. Her latest book, ONLY, appears with Four Way Books in 2022.
sam sax is a queer, jewish, writer and educator. They're the author of Madness, winner of The National Poetry Series and “Bury It” winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. They're the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Granta and elsewhere. Sam has received fellowships from the NEA, Poetry Foundation, MacDowell, and is currently serving as a Lecturer at Stanford University.
Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears (YesYes Books, May 2022), winner of the 2019 Pamet River Prize. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and Vermont Studio Center. She is an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts and lives in San Francisco.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
111 Minna Gallery, 111 Minna Street, San Francisco, United States
USD 0.00