Giovanni Singleton and Sarah Menefee

18 MARCH 2012 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Sarah Menefee, I’m Not Thousandfurs and The Blood About the Heart, and Giovanni Singleton, Ascension, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

More about the readers
Sarah Menefee has published two full-length books of poems, I’m Not Thousandfurs and The Blood About the Heart. Tom Clark says, “Menefee’s poems are down to earth and humanly real. They are ‘political’ in the deepest sense; that is, they offer attention, emotion and support to life itself.” She has been a homeless and anti-hunger activist and is a founding member of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America. giovanni singleton’s Ascension, to be published in early 2012, is her first full-length book of poems. Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon says, “giovanni singleton lets silence do its work.…The poems are minimalist, while engaging a concern for the historical, the personal, the spiritual.…I hear Lucille Clifton—saying the human, the human—when I read this.…” giovanni singleton’s work was recently selected for the biennial New American Poet Series by the Poetry Society of America. Founder of nocturnes (re)view, an acclaimed journal dedicated to artists and writers of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces, she is also coordinator of Lunch Poems, the monthly poetry reading series in the Morrison Room of the Doe Library on the UC Berkeley campus.