Green Apple Books Talk “Essential Truths: The Bay Area in Color” (9th Ave.)

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Join us on Thursday, May 19th at 7pm PT when we celebrate Write Now! SF Bay’s anthology, Essential Truths: The Bay Area in Color at 9th Ave!

Featuring Karla Brundage, Melissa Chen, adrienne danyelle oliver, David Renteria, and editor Shizue Seigel

Masks and Proof of Vaccination Required

About Essential Truths

130 writers and artists respond to the unprecedented uncertainty of our times with prose, poetry, and visual art reflecting their Bay Area realities as Black, Brown, Indigenous and People of Color or White allies.

​The pandemic and other events have tested every fiber of our being and shaken our relationships with family, community, the nation, and the earth itself. As our basic assumptions about lifewere upended again and again, what essential truths emerged?

• What has it been like living with uncertainty?
• What did we lose, what have we released, what have we gained?
• What has tested and inspired us as people of color or allies?
• What gives us strength to keep going?
• What have we learned? How are we working for positive, sustainable change?

About the Contributors

Karla Brundage is a Bay Area based poet, activist, and educator with a passion for social justice. She believes that in order to restore balance to earth racist structures must be dismantled. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the author of Swallowing Watermelons and Mulatta- Not so Tragic. Her work is found in Konch, Hip Mama, sPARKLE + bLINK, and MiGoZine. She is the founder of West Oakland to West Africa Poetry Exchange. https://www.karlabrundage.com/.

Melissa Chen is a second-generation Chinese American hailing from New York City. She graduated with an M.A. in Asia Pacific Studies from the University of San Francisco and continues to reside in the city.

adrienne danyelle oliver is a poet-educator, hip-hop scholar from Little Rock, Arkansas, currently living in the SF Bay Area. Her chapbooks, the body has memories (Nomadic Press) and collective madness (Finishing Line Press), Part poetry, part memoir, part reflections on intergenerational healing, these works are the beginning of a liberation she hopes to witness among all bodies harboring historical trauma. www.adriennedanyelle.com

David Renteria is 28. He grew up in Sacramento and lived in the East Bay for six years before returning to Sacramento. His stories have appeared in the Berkeley Fiction Review, Essential Truths: The Bay Area in Color, and Quarter After Eight.

Shizue Seigel’s nonprofit, Write Now! SF Bay, supports writers and artists of color in the San Francisco Bay Area though monthly workshops, readings and anthologies. Her seven books include Essential Truths, Civil Liberties United, and In Good Conscience. She’s been published in Away Journal, sPARKLE + bLINK, (Her)oics:, We’ve Been Too Patient, All the Women in My Family Sing, and elsewhere. She’s working on her fifth Bay Area anthology and a hybrid memoir about her Japanese American family’s complex legacy.

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.