The Future Is Unsettled: Decolonial Poetics

Event date:
Sunday, May 31
Event time:
12:30pm-1:30pm
Location:
Poetry Stage, Bart Plaza
Booksales:
TBA, right by the stage
Access:
FREE

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.

Moderators:

Dan Alter

Dan Alter’s poems, reviews and translations have been published in journals including Field, Fourteen Hills, and Zyzzyva; his first collection My Little Book of Exiles won the 2022 Cowan Poetry Prize. A volume of translations Take a Breath, You’re Getting Excited, from the Hebrew of Yakir Ben-Moshe, was published by Ben Yehuda Press in September 2024, and Hills Full of Holes, a second collection of poems, by Fernwood Press in March 2025. He lives with his wife and daughter in Berkeley. He works at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley.

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