Poetry

In Future Myths: Blood and Chosen Kin three poets explore the shifting terrain of kinship: the families we inherit, the ones we lose, and the ones we build along the way. If blood once defined belonging, these writers ask what else might hold us together as we imagine the futures still forming.

Pretti Vanghni writes with a mythic sensibility, weaving ancestry, cultural memory, and spiritual imagination into poems that feel both ancient and newly born. Achy Obejas brings her luminous clarity to the intertwined questions of exile, language, and queer belonging, reminding us that chosen kinship has long been a survival practice. Ally Ang’s work moves through intimacy and rupture, tracing how care and solidarity can grow in the spaces where traditional structures fall away.

Together, these poets reimagine kinship as something living and unfinished. Blood may tell one story. Chosen family tells another, one written in acts of care, resistance, and possibility.

In Conjuring & Conjugating: Siguanabas in Future Tense, four community-engaged writers of the Central American Diaspora discuss Indigenous mythologies as vessels for embodiment and transformation. Navigating legacies of violence, they reclaim the right to name themselves—writing into futures beyond the erasure of the colonial gaze.

Taking the figure of La Siguanaba as both provocation and portal, these poets ask what happens when we listen again. What wisdom was hidden inside the warnings? What truths were transformed into myth—and what futures might emerge when those truths are spoken aloud once more?

Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta explores identity, lineage, and resistance through a poetics attentive to the long reach of colonial histories, MK Chavez’s writes at the crossroads of myth, ecology, and diaspora, exploring how ancestral figures continue to haunt and guide the present, and Claudia Castro Luna writes with luminous attention to migration, history, and the enduring presence of land and spirit. Leticia Hernandez Linares brings a community-rooted voice to questions of memory, storytelling, and cultural survival and will share work and lead this panel that explores the myth not as relic, but as a tense we are still learning to speak. To conjure is to call something back into the world. To conjugate is to shift its time.

The future is not a distant horizon—it is a pressure, a question, a making. In this featured reading, Robert Hass and Tongo Eisen-Martin bring their distinct poetics into shared air. Hass writes from a practice of attention—where the natural world, memory, and language gather to ask how we might live with care inside what is vanishing and what remains. Eisen-Martin’s work strikes at the conditions that structure the present, his lines charged with refusal, insurgency, and the demand for otherwise.

Between them, a field emerges: stillness and upheaval, observation and fire. The poems do not resolve the future—they trouble it, press against it, insist on it. Here, poetry becomes a site of reckoning and reimagining, where what comes next is not given, but made.

Unfinished Atlas: Beginning When the World Has Ended, four poets gather at the shifting edge between collapse and creation.

Deema Shehabi writes with luminous attention to exile, memory, and the fragile architectures of home, tracing how language carries both loss and possibility. Daniel Summerhill’s work carries the pulse of music, rhythmic and urgent. It explores justice, history, and the bright insistence of possibility. Cynthia Manick brings a sharp lyric intelligence to questions of culture, place, and survival in a rapidly changing world. Iain Haley Pollock’s poems move with wry precision through landscapes of labor, ecology, and human ambition, probing how we inhabit the structures we’ve set in motion. Emceeing the conversation, Lourdes Figueroa brings a deep engagement with literature, and a fascination with how memory and stories move through communities and change the future. 

Together, these poets sketch an atlas still in progress. One that is attentive to rupture, but equally committed to imagining what might grow in its wake.

The future isn’t waiting for permission. It’s already here and moves through language, familia, cuentos and the everyday acts of naming ourselves.

In El Futuro Vive Aquí / The Future Lives Here, four poets bring work rooted in culture, community, and the living textures of bilingual and Spanglish life. Humor and tenderness with a fierce presence, reminding us that we shape the future in real time.

Josiah Luis Alderete brings sharp wit and kinetic swagger, capturing the rhythms of culture and daily life with big corazón. Deyci Carrillo Lopez writes with tender attention to memory, migration, and the emotional landscapes of belonging. April Lopez explores identity and inheritance, tracing how stories move across generations, and Áurea María Altamirano grounds her work in resilience and cultural memory. These poets write from the present tense of community, where language shifts, stories travel, and the future is already speaking.

Some futures arrive already mapped. Others must be spoken into being.

In The Future Is Unsettled: Decolonial Poetics, poets bring language that questions the stories we’ve been told about land, power, and belonging. Their work moves through memory, migration, and resistance, pushing against inherited narratives and opening space for other ways of seeing.

Dena Rod emcees, bringing their fierce poetic voice and deep commitment to community-centered art to the stage, setting the tone for a reading where the poems refuse easy answers and lean into the unsettled work of imagining otherwise.

Daniel P. Williams writes with lyrical clarity about land, memory, and the histories still shaping the present. Osmani Ochoa’s work moves through diaspora and identity, revealing how language carries both rupture and resilience. Logan Phillips faces his past in a hybrid memoir that transcends genre and creates a roadmap for others to follow. Jason Bayani brings urgency and vulnerability to the page, confronting migration, masculinity, and the restless search for belonging.

These poets remind us that the future isn’t a finished story. It’s something we’re still writing, line by line.

Pull up to the festival’s open mic for teens! Hosted by poet Gabriel Cortez, this open mic is for all the young poets, singers, and rappers in the Bay looking for a space to listen and be heard. Throughout the event, you will experience feature performances by some of the Bay’s best young poets including youth poet laureates, the teen poetry slam team representing the Bay, and more. Want to perform? Signups begin at 1pm and will continue throughout the open mic, as space allows. First priority for open mic signups goes to participants in the Teen Poetry Workshop 1:30–2:30 PM Saturday, May 30. Each performer has up to 4 minutes on the mic. New work and old favorites are welcome, as long as they are written by you. All experience levels are welcome! While open mic signups are only for teens ages 13–19 years old, the audience is open to all.

Some voices don’t wait for the future to arrive. They speak from it.

In I Know Who I Am: Voices in the Now-Future, three powerhouse poets bring language that moves with clarity, conviction, and fire. Their work lives in the present tense where identity is claimed, history is confronted, and the future is already pressing through the lines.

Mahogany L. Browne brings fearless lyric intelligence to the page and stage, weaving justice, imagination, and cultural memory into poems that challenge and uplift. Tramaine Suubi delivers performance alive with presence, drawing audiences into stories shaped by movement and music. Mukethe Kawinzi brings language shaped by the unruly energy and wisdom of the natural world, looking beyond the visible and opening portals to futures that include all living beings. devorah major (poet, activist, former San Francisco Poet Laureate, and Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Awardee for 2026) offers work grounded in history, community, and the enduring power of Black literary traditions.

Together, these writers remind us that the future is created voice by voice, poem by poem.