KimShuck, Thea Matthews, and Kevin Madrigal

"Mapping the Bay," San Francisco Poet Laureate Kim Shuck is joined by Thea Matthews and Kevin Madrigal, reading new poetry. Kim Shuck's latest book of poems is Deer Trails, published by City Lights. Kim Shuck is an Ani Yun Wiya (Cherokee)/Polish-American poet, author, weaver, and bead-work artist who draws from Southeastern Native American culture and tradition as well as contemporary urban Indian life. She was born in San Francisco, California and belongs to the Northern California Cherokee diaspora. She is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She earned a B.A. in Art (1994), and M.F.A. in Textiles (1998) from San Francisco State University. Her basket weaving work is influenced by her grandmother Etta Mae Rowe and the long history of California Native American basket making. She is the winner of the Diane Decorah First Book Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas and the Mary Tallmountain Award for Freedom Voices. In 2017, she was named the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco. Her newest book, Deer Trails, was published by City Lights in summer 2019. She is also one of 13 recipients of the Academy of American Poets inaugural Poets Laureate Fellowships. Born and raised in San Francisco, CA Thea Matthews is an emerging poet, scholar, and activist. She earned her BA in Sociology at UC Berkeley where she studied and taught June Jordan’s program Poetry for the People. A seasoned performer of spoken word, she also poems published in the Atlanta Review, Foglifter, The Rumpus, For Women Who Roar magazine, and others. She is a contributing author in anthologies Still Here San Francisco (Foglifter Press 2019) and Love WITH Accountability: Digging up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (AK Press 2019). Currently, she is working on getting her first full-length collection of poetry Unearth [The Flowers] was published by Red Light Lit in 2020. Kevin Madrigal is a decolonizer of food, art, and health. He is a Chicano first-generation child of inmigrantes Mexicanos from Sur San Francisco. In 2016, he founded Farming Hope in San Francisco to provide employment opportunities in food for folks experiencing homelessness. Currently, he's working on a collection of poems about anxiety and promoting positive mental behaviors as well as an ancestral Mexican cookbook.