Performance: Echoes of Maya: A Celebration of Voice and Verse (SF Main Library)

Anissa Malady

Join us for an afternoon of powerful words and performances as part of the San Francisco Public Library’s 19th One City One Book selection, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. Bay Area artists and creatives will come together to honor the legacy of Maya Angelou on Sunday, November 17th at 2:00 pm at the San Francisco Main Library, Koret Auditorium, 100 Larkin Street. Through poetry, music, and reflection, Performance: Echoes of Maya: A Celebration of Voice and Verse will explore how Angelou’s profound work and life continue to inspire generations. This event is free to the public.

Public Historian Dorothy Lazard will provide a historical perspective on Angelou’s impact on African American and American history, setting the stage for a night of artistic celebration. Selected poets will read from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, share their works, and feature Avotcja, Dorothy Lazard, Tureeda Mikell, Darius Simpson, and Raymond Nat Turner.

Curated by Dr. Kim McMillon.

Avotcja is a storyteller, poet, musician, and DJ whose work blends fierce honesty with musical and poetic mastery. Her poetry resonates with the rhythms of jazz, blues, and urban life, drawing praise from artists and scholars alike. She has been hailed as a unique and invaluable cultural voice, weaving together stories of struggle, triumph, and the beauty of everyday life with her band, Modúpue.

Dorothy Lazard grew up in the Bay Area of the 1960s and ’70s, surrounded by an expansive family network and hungry for knowledge. Today, Lazard is celebrated for her distinguished career as a librarian and public historian. Lazard’s memoir, What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World, recounts her Bay Area upbringing in the ’60s and ’70s, revealing a hunger for knowledge that propelled her into a distinguished career as a librarian and public historian.

Tureeda Mikell, story medicine woman, poet, educator, activist for holism, Black Panther Alum, and UCB Bay Area Writing Project fellow, is an Oakland native. Ngugi wa Thiongo called her—the word magician. She received the 2024 Berkeley Poetry Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Mikell has published over 73 student anthologies from five Bay Area counties. Author of Synchronicity: The Oracle of Sun Medicine (2020), nominated for the California Book Award, Patrice Lumumba Anthology (co-curated 2021), and her full-length magical-realism collection, The Body: Oracle of Memory, Black Lawrence Press, 2024.

Darius Simpson is a writer, educator, and performer from Akron, Ohio, with an MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry from Mills College. He received the 2020 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Author of Never Catch Me (Button Poetry, 2022), his work appears in POETRY Magazine, The Adroit Journal, and American Poetry Review.

Raymond Nat Turner, “The Town Crier,” is a New York City poet and the Artistic Director of the JazzPoetry Ensemble UpSurge!NYC. He has performed at the Harriet Tubman Centennial Symposium, Monterey Jazz Festival, and Panafest in Ghana. Currently, he is the Poet-in-Residence at Black Agenda Report, and his work has been published in various anthologies and outlets. Turner has opened for figures like James Baldwin, sportswriter Dave Zirin, and Congresswoman Barbara Lee.

Dr. Kim McMillon is a producer, playwright, and editor of Black Fire—This Time (Willow Books, 2022). She contributed to Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka (Ohio University Press, 2021) and produced the 2016 Black Arts Movement Conference at Dillard University. McMillon has also co-produced UC Merced’s Black Arts Movement Conference and edited a special edition of The Journal of PAN African Studies on the Black Arts Movement. Her children’s book, The Healing Book of Me, will be released in early 2024.

For more information about this program, please call 415-557-4400 or email kimmac@pacbell.net.
Unless otherwise noted, all programs are drop-in (no registration necessary). All SFPL locations are wheelchair accessible. For accommodations (such as ASL), call (415) 557-4557 or contact accessibility@sfpl.org. Requesting at least three business days in advance will help ensure availability.

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.