Date/Time
Date(s) - 04/07/2018
7:00 pm - 10:00 pm

Location
Joe Henderson Lab, SFJAZZ Center

Category(ies)

• Literature
• Music
• Spoken Word
• Festival
• Poetry

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Curated by SFJAZZ Poet Laureate Genny Lim, this year’s festival will again feature the greatest poets of the Bay Area and beyond, centered on the concept of “wordology.”

A noted jazz poet, Lim has performed at jazz festivals and venues from coast to coast.

Genny Lim is a native San Francisco poet, playwright and performer. She has previously published three poetry collections, Paper Gods and Rebels, Child of War, and Winter Place; a children’s book, Wings for Lai Ho; and is co-author of Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, which received the American Book Award. Her award-winning play, Paper Angels, a prison drama about Chinese immigrants held on Angel Island, was the first Asian American play featured on PBS’s American Playhouse in 1985, and has been produced throughout the U.S. and in Canada. Reprised in 2010 at the San Francisco Fringe Festival in Chinatown Portsmouth Square, it received Best Site Specific Award and is being presented at the Seattle Fringe Festival this year. A noted jazz poet whose collaborators have included the late Max Roach, bassist, Herbie Lewis, Jon Jang, Francis Wong, Anthony Brown and Hafez Modirzadeh, Lim has performed at jazz festivals and venues from coast to coast, including SF Jazz Poetry Festival at SF Jazz and World Poetry Festivals in Caracas, Venezuela and Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Her poetry and vocals can be heard on Asian ImprovArts recordings with Francis Wong, Devotee and Child of Peace; and on Jon Jang’s Immigrant Suite. Lim is the subject of a feature documentary, The Voice, which aired on PBS in 2002; and was featured in the five-part PBS series, The United States of Poetry and San Francisco Chinatown. She served as SF Arts Commissioner under Mayors Art Agnos and Frank Jordan.

Featuring QR Hand, Aya de Leon, Tony Robles with Broun Fellinis

Aya de Leon is a novelist who teaches at the University of California Berkeley. She first came to national attention as a spoken word artist in the underground poetry scene in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a hip-hop theater artist. de Leon is of Puerto Rican, African American, and West Indian heritage, and much of her work explores issues of race, gender, socio-economic class, body and nation. Part of San Francisco Slam Team (they won the Western Region Poetry Slam in 2000. In 2001, she began to develop the hip hop theater show, “Thieves in the Temple: The Reclaiming of Hip Hop” focused on fighting sexism and consumerism in hip hop [1][2] She began her college teaching career at Stanford University in 2001. In 2006, she was chosen as the Director of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People at UC Berkeley, where she currently teaches poetry and spoken word.

Tony Robles, a self described “Friscopino”, born and raised San Francisco, is author of 2 poetry/short story collections, Fingerprints of a Hunger Strike and Cool Don’t Live Here No More–A letter to San Francisco, published by Ithuriel’s Spear Press. Tony was a short list finalist for Poet Laureate of San Francisco, 2017, and is the recipient of the individual literary artist grant from the SF Art Commission 2017. Says current SF Poet Laureate Kim Shuck, “Tony speaks of the city as a relative with a life threatening illness, with love and anger.”

The Broun Fellinis are a jazz/hip-hop trio hailing from the Bay Area whose members include percussionist Professor Boris Karnaz (born Kevin Carnes), bassist Kirk the Redeemer, and woodwind player Black Edgar Kenyatta. Their debut, Aphrokubist Improvisations, Vol. 9, was released in 1995. The group has created their own mythology explaining their origins — they claim to be from the mythical land of Boohaabia, which floats off the coast of Madagascar and is surrounded by the Phat Temple, the Ministry of Imagination, and the Oasis of Surprise, which are all at equal distances from Boohaabia. Further, Karnaz claims that Boohaabia may be reached through the group’s music, or perhaps through Kirk the Redeemer’s bass cabinet if the pilgrim has brought him some cashews; Karnaz promises that the listener’s chair will then sink six inches into the sand and giraffes will appear, ready to take the listener wherever he may want to go. – by Steve Hue

Co-Presented By: