PCSJ Programs & Events
Beautiful Black Books featuring Mona Webb (on Zoom)
Beautiful Black Books
Featuring Mona Webb for National Poetry Month
Join Tshaka Campbell for the next installment of Beautiful Black Books with guest Mona Webb!
BBB is a recurring program featuring black writers in conversation followed by a Q&A. It is a vessel of exchange as we bring black writers to our communities and our communities to these writers to learn about their sources of inspiration.
Register for your Zoom link at: https://bit.ly/3DZiJZD
Ramona Laughing Webb is a Poet-in-Residence at the CoE working at the intersections of performance art, culture change and improved communications around gender and racial/ethnic disparities and health disparities. She has been the MC at the Young Women’s Health & Leadership Summit for the past 8 years and a regular workshop leader for the Youth Steering Committee teaching the youth how to amplify their authentic voice. Scholar practitioner, teaching performance artist and Afro-Creek queer activist Ramona “Mona” Webb serves as the Assistant Artistic Director of San Francisco’s Queer Cultural Center which is the producer of the National Queer Arts Festival. Mona formerly served as Artistic Director of Project ABLE and Lyrical Minded415, which is an Art Based Learning for Equity seasonal course implemented in SFUSD’s Title I Neglected school sites. For 10 years Mona served as poetry Slammaster of San Francisco. Mona is a conservatory trained artist who writes and performs in “docu-ritual- drama theater” and attended the dual Theater Performance Making MFA program at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and Chichester University in Chichester, England. "How to Catch a Rapist in 12 Parts", is her current one person show and it chronicles her journey to seeking justice for a rape committed 20 years ago. Ramona’s pronouns are she, her, them and they.
Santa Clara County Poet Laureate Emeritus Tshaka Campbell has authored four books of poetry and is an internationally recognized artist and performer. He has won grand slam championships in a number of cities across the US. He will publish his next poetry collection, Blood at the Root, with @elmartillopress He currently resides in San José and continues to ask the world to listen different.
TO SUBMIT EVENT FEEDBACK, visit https://bit.ly/3YGz3q1
Third Thursday Open Mic with Dave Eisbach
Long time regular Dave Eisbach shows us the way to words!
Third Thursday is a monthly poetry program in partnership with Poetry Center San José and hosted by Mighty Mike McGee!
Willow Glen Public Library, 1157 Minnesota Ave, San José, 95125.
Sign up for the open mic begins at 6:30pm. Featured guest poet begins shortly after 7pm. Open mic to follow.
Our guest poet tonight is Dave Eisbach!
Dave Eisbach refers to himself as a dinosaur because he loves rhyme. He served on San Jose’s Arts Commission, 2002-2008 when he became an active member of Third Thursday boasting poets like Nils Peterson and Sally Ashton. Under the leadership of Dennis and Christine Richardson, the crew launched three anthologies of its members' poems. He helped revive the San Jose Poetry Festival in 2015 after a pause from Sally Ashton's 2007 Poetry Festival, and joined PCSJ in presenting the second annual Poetry Festival in 2016, still going strong.
He is delighted that Third Thursday is live again, nurtured by Mighty Mike McGee. This more recent period shows a change in his poetry with an emphasis on the Sonnet and Villanelle. He continues to broaden his poetry.
Dave has a book of poetry, Entwined, 2019, price $15. You can reach him at deisbach@sbcglobal.net. He hopes to have a second by Christmas 2024.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Poetry Center San José's mission is to nurture and promote diverse literary expression in our community as a means of exploring, defining, and enriching the human experience.For those under 18 years of age who may be attending, we recommend that a parent/legal guardian be with you during the program.
Please observe San José Public Library’s Safety Guidelines.
To request an accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act for library-sponsored events, please call 408-808-2355 or email Accessibility@sjlibrary.org at least three business days prior to the event.
Third Thursday Open Mic with Ethan Stanton!
Third Thursday is a monthly poetry program in partnership with Poetry Center San José and hosted by Mighty Mike McGee!
Willow Glen Public Library, 1157 Minnesota Ave, San José, 95125.
Sign up for the open mic begins at 6:30pm. Featured guest poet begins shortly after 7pm. Open mic to follow.
Our guest poet tonight is Ethan Stanton!
Ethan Ashkin Stanton grew up in Portola, a small railroad town in the Sierra Nevada, but now lives in San Jose, California. Since he was six years old, he knew he had to be a writer. He has also always known that he had weird stuff in his head. It took the pressure cooker of pandemic parenting along with the explosion of Zoom classes for him to finally make the connection between those two facts and start writing poetry in 2021. He has poems about being a parent, a husband, a son, a high school teacher, a tiny human being in a dark universe, and various other spiritual, political, and midlife things which came to him very unexpectedly along with the writing. But he rolls with it, cause what else can he do? His work has been published in Vita Poetica, Dispatches from Quarantine, and Amethyst Review.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Poetry Center San José's mission is to nurture and promote diverse literary expression in our community as a means of exploring, defining, and enriching the human experience.For those under 18 years of age who may be attending, we recommend that a parent/legal guardian be with you during the program.
Please observe San José Public Library’s Safety Guidelines.
To request an accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act for library-sponsored events, please call 408-808-2355 or email Accessibility@sjlibrary.org at least three business days prior to the event.