Event Details

An afternoon of poetry by J-town Arts writers and friends. Featured writers include Sabrena Taylor, Nancy Hom, Aimee Espiritu, Frederick Cloyd, Adam David Miller, and Pete Yamamoto. Reading to be followed by discussion with the writers. For more info call: 415.921.5007 or email: njahs@njahs.org

Peter Kenichi Yamamoto

Peter Kenichi Yamamoto is of Japanese American mixed race ancestry and was born in 1954. He grew up between San Francisco and Marin and now resides in Chinatown, San Francisco. In his high school year's in Marin Pete was an anti-Viet Nam War and student rights activist. After attending San Francisco State University he lived at the International Hotel for the final three years of its existence in defiance of eviction along with the elderly Filipino Manongs. At the International Hotel he was a member of Kearny Street Workshop and the Asian American Writers Workshop. Following that he became a fixture of Japantown San Francisco and was active in the now defunct Japantown Art and Media Workshop for many years. He now volunteers a great deal for the National Japanese American Historical Society.

Pete is a Poet who draws a great deal of inspiration from the great deceased Filipino American poet, Al Robles. He is now an active member of J-Town Arts. He is was selected as one of the winners of the 2010 Poets Eleven contest held by Jack Hirschman of the Friends of the S.F. Public Library and is published in their anthology POETS ELEVEN 2010. He was also published by Nichi Bei Times newspaper. Pete has read at occasional events in the community such as RHYMES AND RHYTHMS held at the Manilatown Center at the New I-Hotel, events of J-Town Arts, KPFA Radio and events commemorating the life of Al Robles.

Pete's poetry is informed by an eternal search for his internal self-understanding and peace of mind coupled with an intense love of community and the desire to empower others through his words. His seeks both for personal release and the increased enlightenment and empathetic reactions of his readers and listeners. He counts as his inspirations the Filipino American poet Al Robles together with the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, Nazim Hikmet, Paul Eluard, Pablo Neruda, Matsuo Basho and Bertolt Brecht.

Sabrena Taylor

I am an artist and poet, of Japanese, African American, Native American and French ancestry, born in 1957 in Galesburg, Illinois that is part of “the Heartland” of the Midwest. I have been drawing and writing poetry since I was a child in elementary school. My favorite past time was drawing the Japanese women in kimonos that I saw in the Japanese magazines that my mother use to read. In 1985, I moved to California, and shortly after, I started exhibiting my work in 1987. I have exhibited in numerous art shows in the San Francisco Bay Area. Some of my juried exhibitions included “Dark Mother: African Origins and Godmothers” for the Women’s Spirituality Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies, “Rendezvous of Hope: Expressions of Recovery Show” for the Hazelden’s 50th Anniversary Celebration in Minnesota, and “The Brotherhood of Man,” exhibition celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King at the Manor House Gallery of the Arts Council of San Mateo County. My art has also been exhibited at Glide Memorial Methodist Church and the Japanese Community Cultural Center of Northern California in San Francisco, California. One of my greatest joys has been my collaborations with Judith Kajiwara, Butoh dancer, in “Out of the Shadows”, a multi-media performance which also featured Leon Sun, artist and writer, and a performance of a short story entitled “Ki no Kage”. My poetry has been featured in several anthologies including: Intersecting Circles: The Voices of Hapa Women in Poetry and Prose, Amerasia Journal, Skin Deep: Women Writing on Color, Culture and Identity and 2000: Here’s to Humanity. I have studied art at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois and City College in San Francisco, California. I have my M.A. degree from the University of Illinois in Springfield, Illinois and my B.A. degree in Sociology-Anthropology from Knox College.

Nancy Hom 

Nancy Hom was born in Toisan, China and came to the United States when she was five years old. She grew up in New York City and graduated from Pratt Institute in 1971. She moved to San Francisco in 1974. She is an artist, writer, curator, and arts consultant with over 35 years of experience in the non-profit arts field. Widely known for her silkscreen artwork, she has created numerous images for community events, political and social causes. She has also been a graphic designer and children’s book illustrator. She now works in paint, pastel, and mixed media. In 2010 and 2011, she executed two large-scale sculpture installations for the Asian American Women Artists Association. Her work has been published in several publications and her art has been exhibited in numerous galleries, including the de Young Museum and Stanford. A recipient of several awards, including the KQED Local Hero Award (2003), she is currently a freelance curator and organizational development consultant for several non-profit arts organizations in the Bay Area.

Aimee Espiritu

Aimee M. Espiritu has been creating art, performing and directing theater for the past 10 years. Espiritu completed her BFA in Industrial Design in 2003 and also obtained her Master's in Education at in 2009. Moving to Oakland, in 2005 - her first Bay area production was Pagbabalik (Return) in 2006. Espiritu contributed as a writer, actor, and director in Bindlestiff Studio's all-queer productions "The Bakla Show" (2007 and 2010) - while also providing direction for Translations (2009), Before We Were Named (2010), and Scenes/Unseen (2011) for The National Queer Arts Festival in San Francisco. Espiritu is a contributing visual artist for the published anthology Walang Hiya: Literature Taking Risks Toward Liberatory Practice (2010). Her series of four mixed media collages appears before each chapter and has been exhibited at CounterPULSE's Performing Diaspora Festival (2009), San Francisco Main Public Library, Bayanihan Cultural Center, HOTPOT: Re-visioning Queer Asian Identities (2010) and the Pistahan Art Pavilion (2010).

Frederick Cloyd

Fredrick Douglas Kakinami Cloyd was born in Japan in 1955, shortly after the US occupation officially ended. His African-American/Cherokee/Welsh father was an occupation soldier in Korea and Japan while Fredrick's mother — a Japanese/Chinese/Austro-Hungarian girl of the war-ruins was from an elite nationalist family in Japan. He received a Masters degree from a postcolonial/feminist-oriented social cultural anthropology program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco in 2001 and entered the PHD program immediately after to deepen his commitment to thinking liberation, social justice, and identity. He co-convened a conference in 2004 entitled: Kurdish Human Rights: Statelessness, Resistance and Survival. He has been speaking, consulting and writing about race, gender, sexuality and nationalism since 1978. He has written book reviews for the Pacific Reader in Seattle, Washington since 1995 and has been featured in various news and television segments speaking to multiracial issues in Colorado, New York and Washington state. He has been published in the National Japanese American Historical Society publications. He feeds his love of Asian and Latin foods, coffee, volleyball, TV shows, music and steam trains while working on a series of works of interstitial auto-ethnographies weaving collective memories of postwar gender and race issues of the Black-Pacific peoples, continuing from the Cold-War era into our present, entitled: Dream of the Water Children. Excerpts are currently featured on the Discover Nikkei web-journal.

Adam David Miller

Adam David Miller is an African-American poet, writer, publisher, and radio programmer and producer.

Born in Dorchester County, South Carolina on October 8, 1922, Miller published one of the first collections of modern African-American poetry, as well as four books of poetry and a memoir, Ticket to Exile about his life growing up in the Jim Crow South. His much anticipated fifth book of poems is now available. The Sky is a Page: New and Selected Poems is his first poetry collection in 10 years.

Miller served in the United States Navy from 1942 -1946. He attended university on the G.I. Bill, earning a Masters Degree in English (1953) from the University of California at Berkeley where he also completed post-degree work in drama and helped found the university’s Graduate Student Journal, a magazine of opinion and art.

Throughout his career, Miller has promoted and published other writers. In Dices, Or Black Bones, (1970), he showcased the early poems of Al Young, California’s poet laureate (2005-2008), Ishmael Reed, Clarence Major, Lucille Clifton, Etheridge Knight and Victor Hernandez Cruz. Read more...

In conjunction with the current exhibit in the NJAHS Peace Gallery DEEP ROOTS NEW SHOOTS