About this Event
Join poets Karol Olesiak and Taneesh Kaur for an evening of poetry exploring disability, ecological crisis, militarism, memory, and the possibilities of resistance and reconciliation.
Olesiak will read from his chapbooks Saturday Morning Crusades (Finishing Line Press) and The Airplane Game (Moonstone Press), works that navigate the intersections of bodily vulnerability, childhood mythology, migration, environmental destruction, and the legacies of war.
Through personal testimony, humor, and formal experimentation, the evening asks what an armistice might mean beyond the battlefield—between bodies and institutions, humanity and the natural world, and personal memory and collective history.
Author Biography — Karol Olesiak
Karol Olesiak is a Polish-born American poet, disabled combat veteran, and graduate of the University of San Francisco's MFA program. Karol's poetry explores disability, war, migration, ecological crisis, and the intersections of personal and collective memory. Karol's work has appeared in Laurel Review, Multiplicity, Rogue Agent, Fifth Wheel Press, Pictura Journal, Sugar House Review, among others. A 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee, Karol is the author of two chapbooks: Saturday Morning Crusades and The Airplane Game.
Book Synopses
Saturday Morning Crusades — Finishing Line Press
Drawing upon childhood cartoons, cultural mythology, and the contradictions of American life, Saturday Morning Crusades examines how violence, identity, and intergenerational recollection become embedded in self knowledge. Moving between humor and unease, the collection confronts disability, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves about innocence and corruption.
The Airplane Game — Moonstone Press
A finalist in Moonstone Arts Center's 2024 Chapbook Contest, The Airplane Game explores migration, militarism, ecological precarity, and the experience of living between cultures and histories. Through free verse and formal experimentation, including sestinas, the collection examines displacement, the legacies of war, and humanity's uneasy relationship with the natural world.
Additional Reader
Taneesh Kaur
Taneesh will be joining me as a featured reader. Taneesh will be reading from her full length collection Thawing: A Poetic Memoir from Collapse Press
Taneesh Kaur is an award-winning, first-generation Punjabi teaching artist based in San Francisco. Her creative writing won the 2025 SFF/Nomadic Literary Award for fiction, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has been supported by Kearny Street Workshop and Center for Cultural Innovation. Her visual art shows in galleries throughout California, also earning praise from the International Luxembourg Art Prize. Her creative work appears in Prairie Schooner, Colossus Press, Narrative Northeast, Street Spirit, KALW and elsewhere, and her full-length collection, Thawing: A Poetic Memoir, was released in 2024 from Collapse Press.
Event venue & nearby stays
Medicine For Nightmares, 3026 24th Street, San Francisco, United States
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