Buy your Friday Night ticket here! Or get the 2024 San José Poetry Festival Pass!
This is Day Two of our four-day festival! Check out the complete list of events that are part of the 10th Annual San José Poetry Festival! Our festival pass will get you into all live events and online events.
This event is free to all youth aged 19 and under and to those with a festival pass. $20 for general public and $15 for PCSJ Members. Admission may be purchased at the door.
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This year's Friday Night main event is one that bridges three points of poetry and place: San José, Minneapolis and Vancouver, BC. Three different styles of poetry from veteran three voices—with shared influences and vastly different approaches. To have Bao Phi, Arlene Biala and RC Weslowski share a stage on the same night is sure create moments we will not forget.
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Bao Phi is a two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist. His poetry is included in The Best American Poetry 2006 anthology and published widely elsewhere, including in two collections from Coffee House Press and in Poetry magazine, Asian American Literary Review, and The Spoken Word Revolution. His fiction and essays have appeared in Octavia’s Brood: Stories from Social Justice Movements, and A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota.
Bao is also known for his children’s books. His A Different Pond received six starred reviews and multiple awards, including the Caldecott Honor, an Ezra Jack Keats Honor, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association award for best picture book, the Minnesota Book Award for picture books, and other recognitions. His latest children’s book is You Are Life.
He was named by Minneapolis Monthly as Best Author 2016, and the Artist of the Year (2017) and Author of the Year (2018) by City Pages, and was awarded the Kay Sexton Award in 2024. He was recently on the editing team for We The Gathered Heat, a forthcoming anthology of Asian American and Pacific Islander poets in the oral and spoken word traditions.
Born in Saigon shortly before the mass exodus of his family and many others to the United States, Bao is a Vietnamese American raised in the Phillips neighborhood of south Minneapolis. He currently lives in Minneapolis with his child and their cat.
Arlene Biala (she/her) is a Pinay poet and performance artist born in San Francisco, CA and raised in the South Bay. She has been participating in poetry performances and workshops in the Bay Area for over 30 years and was Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County for 2016 and 2017. She is the author of several collections of poetry: bone, continental drift, and her beckoning hands, which won the 2015 American Book Award. Her latest book, one inch punch, was published in 2019.
Arlene’s poetry has been described as "grounded in ritual object and ritual practice, mantras that resonate within the body and plant the body firmly in the world. Her work responds to the call of ancestors and our own broken bodies, spirits, and the spaces we inhabit. Her poems are prayer flags offered to those whose stories have been silenced, hidden, and ignored. Arlene’s work centers on stories of family, of generations who have left their native lands to live in diaspora, particularly those from the Philippines. She writes poetry to serve as witness, to create space for recognition and dialogue toward healing.
RC Weslowski is an award-winning poet and broadcaster/podcaster including the 2024 Hunna Bubba Prize. He’s also a workshop leader, clown and bon vivant. He has performed his poetry across Turtle Island and parts of Europe since 1998. RC is celebrating his 25th year of performing poetry by being at the San Jose Poetry Festival. His first collection of poetry My Soft Response to the Wars is available now from Write Bloody North Publishing
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Want more poetry? Check out the rest of the San José Poetry Festival lineup.
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