Join us at the Anderson Collection for an evening of poetry!
Bay Area poets and Stanford students share poems inspired by the Anderson Collection. Travel through the museum to hear poets read alongside the works that inspired them. Come learn about their process and write a little something of your own in response to prompts the poets will offer. We hope you'll go home with inspiration and the seeds of ekphrastic poems of your own!
Wednesday, May 22
6-7:30PM
Anderson Collection
314 Lomita Drive
This event is hosted by the Stanford Arts Institute (SAI) in collaboration with the Anderson Collection, and with support from the Office of the Vice President for the Arts.
Poets
M.K. Chavez
Horse
Deborah Butterfield (1980)
MK Chavez is an art monster, writer, and educator. Chavez co-directs the Berkeley Poetry Festival, co-curates the Lyrics & Dirges reading series, and is executive director of Ouroboros Writing Lab. Chavez's writing explores mixed-race identity, social justice, environmental resilience, horror cinema, ritual, and the creative process. Chavez’s work has been recognized with the Pen Josephine Miles Award, San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Award, and a 2023 Ruth Weiss Maverick Award. Chavez’s literary offerings: Dear Animal, Mothermorphosis, the lyric essay chapbook A Brief History of the Selfie, and Virgin Eyes. Recent work can be found on the walls of the art installation Manifest Differently.
Tongo Eisen-Martin
The Coat II
Philip Guston (1977)
Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. He is the author of Someone’s Dead Already, Heaven Is All Goodbyes, Waiting Behind Tornados for Food, and Blood on the Fog. In 2020, he co-founded Black Freighter Press to publish revolutionary works. He is San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate.
Keith Ekiss
Girl on the Beach
Richard Diebenkorn (1957)
Benjamin Gucciardi
Window
Mark Tobey (1953)
Benjamin Gucciardi’s first book, West Portal, (University of Utah Press, 2021), was selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry and was named a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. He is also the author of the chapbooks Timeless Tips for Simple Sabotage (Quarterly West, 2021), winner of the Quarterly West Chapbook contest, and I Ask My Sister’s Ghost (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2020). His poems appear in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, POETRY Magazine and elsewhere. In addition to writing, he works with newcomer youth in Oakland, California through Soccer Without Borders, an organization he founded in 2006.
Photo credit: Rewa Bush
Cintia Santana
Untitled
Susan Rothenberg (1994)
Cintia Santana is a Senior Lecturer in the Comparative Literature Department at Stanford University. She teaches literary translation courses, in addition to poetry workshops in Spanish and in English. Santana's poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2016 and 2020, the 2023 Best of the Net Anthology, Poets.org, Poetry Daily, Split this Rock, as well as numerous journals. She is the recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Her debut poetry collection, The Disordered Alphabet (Four Way Books, 2023), was short-listed for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance 2023 Golden Poppy Award in Poetry and received the North American Book Award's Silver Medal in Poetry.
Maw Shein Win
Sky Garden
Louise Nevelson (1959-1964)
Maw Shein Win's most recent poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. Win often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and her Process Note Series features poets on their process. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a new literary community. Win’s full-length collection Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) is forthcoming in Fall 2024. mawsheinwin.com
Sameer Jha
Stage #2 With Bed
Nathan Oliveira (1967)
Sameer Jha is a senior at Stanford majoring in Symbolic Systems and minoring in Creative Writing. A California Arts Scholar, they have won a Governor's Medallion in Creative Writing as well as a Scholastic Art and Writing Awards Gold Medal.
Ariana Lee
Hoarding My Frog Food
David Gilhooly (1982)
Ariana Lee is the 2022-2023 Houston Youth Poet Laureate and two-time member of Meta4 Houston, the city's official youth slam poetry team ranked #1 in the world at Youth Speaks' Brave New Voices competition in 2023. Lee has opened for US Poet Laureate Ada Limón and performed original work for NASA, the NCAA, Stop AAPI Hate, the Aspen Institute, the Houston Mayor's Office, and more. She is a first-year undergraduate student at Stanford University.
Sahir Qureshi
Fall Euphony
Hans Hofmann (1959)
Sahir Qureshi is an Urban Studies major and Creative Writing minor in his final year of undergrad at Stanford, and is originally from Fremont, CA. He is a prose writer that recently began writing poetry and is interested in the potential of ekphrasis to elucidate moments of sublimity and movement. Sahir has lived in the Bay Area his whole life and finds Bay Area nature to be an endless trove of creative inspiration. He also dances with Stanford Bhangra and listens to a lot of music in his free time.
Inter-Departmental Mail Code
#2250
Office
(650) 497-9905
Fax
(650) 723-8231
ADDRESS
Stanford Arts
Littlefield Center
2nd Floor
365 Lasuen Street
Stanford, CA 94305
