SF Poet Laureate Genny Lim + Youth Poet Laureates (SF Main Library)

San Francisco’s 9th Poet Laureate Genny Lim hosts a special program featuring our city’s first Youth Poet Laureates: SF Youth Poet Laureate Karan Gupta, Vice SF Youth Poet Laureate Aisha McCulloch and Tika Zahiri, SF Youth Poet Laureate Cohort Member. Come celebrate poetry as an eternal source of inspiration and resilience, as a vital language of human connection and unity in a world fraught with adversity, violence and disunity. With butterfly harp music performed by Harriet Lim.

Genny Lim, San Francisco’s 9th Poet Laureate, curates the bi-monthly Living Poets Society Reading Series, an intergenerational poetry series that features youth poets and established local poets at various SFPL branch libraries. A former SFJazz Poet Laureate, Lim has collaborated with many musicians, including Del Sol Quarter, Jon Jang, Destiny Muhammad and Max Roach. She is the author of five poetry collections, as well as Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, winner of the American Book Award.

Karan Gupta is the inaugural San Francisco Youth Poet Laureate. A writer since childhood years with his father, Gupta believes that poetry is writing’s most potent form and uses it to explore what it means to grow up in a rapidly changing San Francisco.

Aisha Rae McCulloch, San Francisco’s first Vice Youth Poet Laureate says, “Poetry is how I process all of it: both what I experience through myself and what I experience through others. Through poetry, I try to make sense of the world around me and the world within me.”

Tika Zahiki participated in the Youth Poet Laureate program launched in 2025 by 826 Valencia, Youth Speaks, the San Francisco Public Library and the Mayor’s Office. Her lyrical ode to San Francisco appears in the recent poetry anthology, I Can Feel You Across the Seas.

Harriet Lim, a native San Franciscan, grew up listening to Cantonese classical music in Chinatown. She learned to play the butterfly harp at the age of six and has been playing it ever since.

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