Join MI poets for an afternoon of dramatic poetry recitations. Bring your lunch and your well tuned ear.

Heather Saunders Estes lives in the Inner Sunset district of San Francisco. After a career in non-profit leadership she has time to walk the city perfecting her map of the best vacant lots and corners of parks to pick blackberries. Her poems and photographs are in multiple publications including Sisyphus, The Plum Tree Tavern, These Fragile Lilacs, Pangolin Review, Vistas and Byways, Bach In the Afternoon and more. She is currently in the editing process of her first book. More information on her website www.HeatherSaundersEstes.com.

Helen Noakes is a playwright, novelist, writer, art historian, and linguist, who was brought up in and derives richness from several of the world’s great traditions and philosophies. She believes that writing should engage and entertain, but also inform and inspire. She also believes that because the human race expresses itself in words, it is words, in the end, that will show us how very similar we are and how foolish it is to think otherwise.

Jeanne Powell has earned degrees from Wayne State University and the University of San Francisco. She is a published poet and essayist with books in print from Taurean Horn Press and Regent Press. For ten years she hosted an acclaimed spoken word series, “Celebration of the Word.” She is the inspiration behind Meridien PressWorks™, which has published 20 authors since 1996. Jeanne has been an instructor in the College Summit, OLLI and Upward Bound programs. She has been featured reading her poems and essays in many venues including Folio Books in Noe Valley, Bird & Beckett Books in Glen Park, and Book Passage at the Ferry Building. She is a lifetime member of Mechanics Institute.

Frank Cebulski is a San Francisco poet, translator, and art and book reviewer. His books of poetry are: Corm (Berkeley: Oyez, 1974), Mediterranean Sonnets (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1988), Concrete Visual Shaped (Berkeley: Light • Gravity Press, 2006), Only Emotion Endures (AuthorHouse, 2009), The Fifth World (AuthorHouse, 2010), Lonely Nights & Wild Women (AuthorHouse, 2011), and The Triumph of Death at Pisa (work in progress). He is founder and owner of Light • Gravity Press, where he published various broadsides of his concrete, visual and shaped poems. He has translated poems from French and Latin, including a complete translation of Éros Énergumène (Eros Raving, AuthorHouse, 2017) by Denis Roche. He studied physics and English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and British and American literature at the universities of Cincinnati, California at Berkeley, and Kings College, London. He was Bancroft Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and Fulbright Lecturer to France at the University of Metz. He was for thirty years contributing editor for Artweek and has written art criticism for Art in America, Sculpture, and Examiner.com. He was the first Director of Technical and Professional Writing at San Francisco State University. To learn more about him and his poetry, visit his website at http://www.cebulski.net.

Chun Yu, Ph.D., poet, graphic novelist, and scientist is the author of the award-winning memoir in free verse Little Green: Growing Up During the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Simon & Schuster) and a historical graphic novel in progress on Mao and Li Yu (a tenth century Chinese emperor) as China’s “Emperor Poets” (Roaring Brook Press/Macmillan). She contributed to the award-winning anthology Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace and Open Doors etc.. She has also been published on Boston Herald and MIT Tech Talketc.. Her new poetry collection in English and Chinese has won a San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant which merges science, art, and spirituality based on her experiences as an immigrant from an old culture in revolution to a new world with transforming science and technologies.  She has also won a Zellerbach grant for her project “Two Languages, One Community” with Oakland Asian Cultural Center and poet Michael Warr, connecting Chinese and African American communities with poetry and story writing. “Chun Yu’s poetry creates sense and order that readers young and old, eastern and western, will appreciate,” writes Maxine Hong Kingston.