Women, Cyborgs, Revolutionary Petunias, and Other Creatures

This reading celebrates the wild, wired, and the wondrous. Inspired, and the fierce multiplicity of the natural world, this portal brings together five poets whose work transgresses borders—of body, genre, and possibility. These poets will open portals that invite us into places of resistance and rage, that when honored transform into generative and sacred places. Rachel Richardson’s work bends time and language, drawing from historical fragments and embodied memory to question whose stories survive and how. Her poems illuminate what’s hidden beneath the surface of the everyday. Language and spirit commingle in Georgina Marie, Lake County Poet Laureate emeritus’s lyrical activism. She writes poems rooted in place, grief, and renewal—pulling language from the earth and the divine alike. Oakland’s Yaffaz AS words dismantle binaries and build new grammars for queer, trans, and brown becoming. Their poetics are glitchy, expansive, and defiant. Lynne Thompson, former Los Angeles Poet Laureate, explores diasporic identity, lineage, and the many selves we carry through history and into the future. As a conduit of worlds she create poetry that transports and brings communities together. Cinematic and visceral—Shabnam Piryaei’s work shapeshifts across borders and forms. Her work is a philosophical inquiry and a healing journey, and luminous defiance. This is a celebration of what refuses to be defined. Join us where the petals have teeth and language mutates into power.