 Welcome, everyone. My name is Janine, and I'm a children's librarian with the San Francisco Public Library. I'm so happy you're here with us to celebrate Women's History Month with an afternoon of readings and conversation with our new San Francisco poet laureate, Tongo Eisenmarten, joined by dynamite women authors and poets, Mahogany L. Brown and Safia Elhudo. This March we celebrate women everywhere with our program series, Her Story. Check out the Her Story webpage of San Francisco Public Library to see our upcoming events, find more YA and children's books by women authors and illustrators, exciting book lists, and more. At this time, I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge that here in San Francisco, we stand on the unceded land of the Ramatush Ohlone people who continue to live, work, and play here today. The library is committed to uplifting the names of these lands and community members from these nations with whom we live together. We encourage you to learn more about First People's culture and land rights and are committed to hosting events and providing educational resources on Indigenous culture. Please mark your calendars for Tongo's inaugural address as San Francisco's eighth poet laureate. This will take place on Wednesday, April 21st at 6pm on the San Francisco Public Library YouTube. Featuring Tongo and several more of his poet friends, this will be an unforgettable evening of poetry and exposition on the revolutionary potentials of art. And of course, we would like to thank the friends of the San Francisco Public Library for their generous support of this entire program series. We couldn't do this without them. And now it is my pleasure to introduce our poets. Tongo Eisenmarten is the San Francisco Poet Laureate appointed by Mayor London N. Breed in January 2021. He's the founder of Black Frater Press. His book, Heaven is All Goodbyes, received a 2018 American Book Award, the 2018 California Book Award for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Again, tune in to his inaugural address on April 21st. Toganielle Brown is a writer, organizer and educator, executive director of Bowery Poetry Club and artistic director of Urban Word NYC and Poetry Coordinator at St. Francis College. Brown has received fellowships from Agnes Gund, Air Serenbe, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research, and Rauschenberg. She's the author of the most recent works, Chlorine Sky, Woke, A Young Poet's Call to Justice, Woke Baby, and Black Girl Magic. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Toganielle Hillu is the author of The January Children, which received the Silverman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award, and Girls That Never Die, and the novel and verse, Home is Not a Country. Make Me a World, Random House 2021. Toganielle is by way of Washington, DC. She holds an MFA from the new school, a Cave Canem fellowship, and a 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent-Roseberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Safia is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and noted in Forbes Africa's 2018 30 Under 30. And now it is my pleasure to pass the mic on to our Poet Laureate, Tongo. Thanks, Janine. And thank all of you for joining us, you're in for a treat. We have two oracles in the virtual building. I'm just going to say a little, just a couple of poems and get out of the way. Starting now. Apparently, apparently too much of San Francisco was not there in the first place. This dream requires more condemned Africans or put another way, state violence rises down, or still life is just getting warmed up, or army life is looking for a new church and ignored all other suggestions or not made up their minds as to who is going to be their friends. You know, this is the worst downtown yet. And I've bought a cigarette everywhere. I've taken many a walk to the back of a bus that let on out the back of a storyteller's prison sentence then on out the back of slave scores but this is my comeback face. I left my watch on the public bathroom sink and took the toilet with me through that the first bus I saw eating single mothers half alive. Through through the bus line number then on out the front of the White House that hopefully you find comfort downtown but if not we brought you enough cigarette filters to make a decent winter coat. A special species of handshake let's all know who's King and what's the lifespan of uniform cloth. His coffin needs to put acting like those are bursting. He nails have no wings have no voice other than out of a white world down there book pages in the gas pump catch you in the way. Three nurses is the rule, or the way potato sag mask also well with radio calls, or the way condemned Africans fought they way back to the ocean only to find waves made in 1920s burnt up piano parts European backdoor deals and red flowers for who spent all day in the sun mumbling in San Francisco red flowers but what's the color of a doctor visit their book titles in the streets book titles like hero you make a better zero or hey for a cold lady the president is dead or pay me back in children or they hung up their bodies in their own museums another book titles pulled from a drum solo run here hero lied to hide in place on a bulletin 10 precincts know where to go. No heaven or any other good idea in the sky politics means that people did it and people do it. Understand that one in San Francisco and other places that was never really there I bet this ocean thinks it's a notion but it's not. It's a sixth admission street on know who's King King of things you know like America I'm proud to deserve to die. I'm going to eat my dinner extra slow tonight in this police day candy dispenser you all call the neighborhood. Never mind a murder is insomnia or the tea kettle preparing everyone for police sirens. I go to the railroad tracks and follow them to the station of my enemies a cold ball to man pitches pennies at my mug shot negative all over the United States there are toddlers in the rock. I see why everyone out here got in the big cosmic basket and why blood agreements mean a lot and why I get shot back at I understand the psycho spiritual refusal to write white history and take the glass freeway. White skin tattooed on my right forearm ricochet sewage near while collapsing to a rat infested manhood my new existence is living graffiti in the kitchen with a lot of gun cylinders to hack up House of God in part no cops in part my body brings down the Christmas the new bullish pray over blankets made from the old bullets pray over the 28 hours next beauty mark extra judicial Confederate statute restoration the waistband before the next protest poster a by the way. Time is not an illusion your honor. I will save your desk for last you're a witty your honor. You're moving money again your honor it is only right and one thing. Now white cops and prison guard shadows reminded me of spoiled milk floating on the oil spill a neighborhood making a lot of fuss over his demise a new lake for a black Panther Party. Malcolm X's ballroom jacket slung over my son's shoulder the figment of village. A new news to a new white preacher all in an abstract painting of a president and bought slavery sometime didn't attach it screeches and military boats in election Tuesday car. A cold blooded study and leg irons proof that some white people have actually found a nuisance the sundown couples made their vows of love over opaque peach plastic and both action audiences. The Medgar every second is definitely my favorite law of science. Final news clippings and primitive Methodist my arm changes imperialism. Simple policing versus structural frenzies elementary school script versus even wider white spectrum artless bleeding in the challenge of watching civilians think of terrible rituals they have around the corner. They let their elders beg for public mercy I'm going to go ahead and sharpen these kids hairs in the arrows myself and see how much gravy spills out of family crest modern fans of war with their t-shirt poems and t-shirt guilt and me having on the cheapest pair of shoes on the bus. I have no choice but to read the city walls for size of my life a tour guide to your robbery I also am cigarette saying look what I did about your silence. ransom water and box ring gold is decade is only for accent grooming I guess ransom water and box ring go to corner store must dot word games I guess all these tons rummage jump. You know the start of mass destruction begins and ends in restaurant bathrooms and some people using other people clean. Are you telling me it's a rag in the sky. Waiting for you. Yes, we've written the same we set a state you know we should have been in warehouse jobs with the communists but now more cordial hallway walking to our lives now the whistling is less playful in the bar bar overcrowded to my dear. If it is not a city. It is a prison. If it has a prison. It is a prison. When a courtyard talks on behalf of military issue all walks take place outside of the body, dear life to your left, a medieval painting to your right and that is really makes an impression crowd people living in thin air you have five minutes to learn how to see through this breeze. When a mask goes sideways Bob wire becomes the floor Bob wire becomes the roof 40 feet into the sky becomes out of bounds, when a mass breaks and have my was way. Did you know they killed the world for the sake of giving everyone the same backstory. We're watching Gary Indiana fight itself into the sky. Old pennies for when for that when feeling you get before the hood goes up and over your headache pennies that stick together mocking all aspirations I mean stuck together pennies was the first newspaper I've read along with the storefront and army that always lets us down with a holy spirit favors the background. So is in a situation to offer 100 ways to remain a loser. So is watching a clock opening the eyes don't lie to sad people was we talking about again. The narrator asked the graveyard at 10 minutes flat said the graveyard the funeral only took 10 minutes and never tell that to anyone again you just go pin the 90s on me. All 30 years of them. How should I know the difference between sleep and satire the pyramid of corner stores fell on our heads we died right away. That building wants to climb up and jump off another building these are downtown decisions, somewhere on this planet is August 7th and we running down the rest thinking one more needs to come with me man what evaporated on earth, so that we could be sent back down. Right now and now I'm going I'm going to turn it over. You know, I wish I really can't do any justice to the two authors. Just, you know, the leaders leaders of both craft and consciousness that are, you know, the most necessary. Human beings today. You did so. Let me get out the way as fast as possible. First, for your viewing pleasure. Mahogany Brown. Time ago. Of course you are the Laureate of San Francisco. Of course, they are one of the best to do it issue. All right, so chlorine sky is all about figuring out who you are when so much of your youth was determined by who your friend is, and it centers the voice and story of a girl named sky. She's a basketball player. She's very loyal. She's California. She's raised in California as was I am from West Oakland. Shout out to dogtown. Shout out to popular park which is where most of these basketball scenes were inspired by. But let me see I'm going to read a little bit of, I'm going to read something different because I read last week with my girl Elizabeth I survey though. So I want to I want to give you something a little bit different work. All right, I'm gonna try this one. My big cousin Inga asked me, who you playing small for. And I pretend I don't know what she's talking about. She's five foot 11 and the tallest woman in our family. She's a basketball coach for the little kid league during summer and after she saw I had handles in fourth grade. She ain't let me drop the rock sense. Who you playing small for means I don't get to sink into the corner. She's a home in the shadow, not when there was a court nearby. Inga attends downtown community college and talks to ease almost every day. But sometimes it's like they don't even like each other. When he said and Inga argues and he screams into the phone. It's weeks before I see Inga again. I'll come home from the pool and she'll be on the porch or sitting on the hood of her mama's car, waiting for ease to come home from her classes at state. She'll shrug when I say where you been and then say I love her, but I don't like her. Most times I think if we weren't related, we wouldn't be around each other at all. When she's at the house we go straight to the court. She makes me play her one on one. She hits the ball out my hand if I'm slapping. She kicks at my feet planted shakes ahead. Play D. Lil, what did I teach you. Inga calling me Lil tells me I'm someone's sister. Inga calling me Lil shows me I'm not out here on my own and everything I do means something to someone else. And just like that, I began to play for keeps on the court. There is no mercy. I'm a baller and I don't care who is bothered by all the space I take up. And then I want to give you a little bit about that moment where you're like word I'm fly I know I'm doing this right I'm good I'm a good friend I'm a good person. And still there there are those moments outside of yourself where you can you can feel the energy tugging at and who you are, are who you are right and who you are trying to be remembered as. And this is the moment where she goes to school and kind of see some weirdness. And I know it got my name on it. That's how Trey got shot. That's how Tanisha got got rumors be the worst thing since government cheese. Grandma Maxi say, hands crisscrossed across the chest means you got something to hide. She also say, make a cheese sandwich for after school snack, no matter the stomach ache that comes to me. Let Tanisha tell it, keeping to yourself won't save you. She was just at the bus stop and the girls jumped her for wearing blue, and the girls jumped her for talking to their boy friends at the mall, and the girls jumped her because she thinks she cute. And I don't want my name attached to a beat down or a rumor, but laws of the school say I got at least one, if not both coming to me. I figure, because I figure it's the rumor, because it gets too quiet when I walk into a room, like when my breath is being judged, and my whole stomach turns on itself tight and rock hard, like I just ate one of them cheese sandwiches. I wish I could ask lately what happened, while everyone is staring at me, but I got too many questions and not one person to depend on for answers. When a rumor hits the wind, the room is a graveyard of friends, those the same girls that laugh when I laugh but now they laugh without including me. Now they take pictures with each other, and I know where in the frame. Have you ever started a rumor, like not on purpose maybe you shared a secret and the secret got wings and then someone shared that same secrets with wings except they gave it a candle because it was too dark or something. Maybe they needed some light and maybe the wings took flight with the light and maybe they share the same candle winged thing with someone that don't know or don't care and in the wind that flame goes, lighten up all the dead. Do you know how it can start slow like a burn or a tickle until it's not funny anymore. It feels like a needle pressing down before the nurse gives the vaccination shot. It feels like a joke that everyone is laughing at, except the person they're joking about. Instead of laughing that warm glow that grows inside your chest and hands and crawls across your cheeks like some uncontrollable kind of happy. It feels more like closing your eyes tight so tight, the air can't get in and the water can't get out. Can you feel that sting. That's how it feels like a forever sting. When I'm on the basketball court. I laughed at I ain't pointed at I ain't forgotten. I ain't really myself at all. The only place that feel as good as the court is when I'm in Clifton's arms in his arms I laughed at in his arms I am pointed at in his arms I ain't forgotten with Clifton I feel like I'm on the court, but my heart is certain. My hands frame my face, like my hands hold the rock, his lips come to mind, and my heart flutter the same as when I realized the ball in the air, the net, waving a welcome song, perfect aim. No swish my first kiss, I swoon when I'm on the court. So she got a little bit of attention right. I'll close with this part don't go on time. I got a little bit of time so Lely says, Google makes everything perfect. Look it up. How do you fix a run in your stocking. You don't. How do you make a fall. How do you make a boy fall deep in like focus on your lip gloss. Apply a second coat, touch his arm whenever you can. Don't let him grab you up. How to kiss, find a mirror, purse your lips together, kiss the glass, make sure it isn't wet when you pull back and stare at the impression of your breath. Do it again. How to fight the sadness. Dance to your favorite song, loud loud, call your friends and talk them into walking them all with you call someone that likes you more than you like them and let their adoration fill you up. Put on your favorite pair of leggings and struck to the corner store, slow, buy something small, a pack of gum, a candy bar or a bag of flaming hot Cheetos. Don't laugh loud in front of your enemies. Don't write about it. Don't write about it. Now, don't leave evidence of the sad and never let anyone take you somewhere you can come back from. So as you can see, sky the protagonist has a lot of different views of herself that is informed by who she is on the court who she is it to her family. She is to her friend not friend or bestie not bestie. And then of course, who she is in school, which I reckon young people go through all the time, shoot adults be going through it too, if we honest, what you think is Instagram is about. What they doing waiting for them likes all that to say. I'm going to, I'm going to read this last one. And yeah, thank y'all for having me I'm excited to hear Safia read from home is not a country. I just want to hoop. I want to do something that ain't got nothing to do with being a girl. I want to do something that don't give folks a right to tell me to sit quiet or be still a place small I don't want to play small. I think of lately, how mighty her mouth is how she walks in in the room goes silent, how she is like a boss. But now I realize she ain't no boss nah, I realize it's all a trick. I realize being girl is a head being a girl is heavy business. It's just like a basketball game with no referee. Just two teams and everybody plays by their own rules. People only care about winning. You don't have to mind the ball or the gravity but people only care about winning. They don't care who they take from. They don't care about how foul they be. So you pivot and protect yourself until something or someone else comes for you and they foul and double dribble and challenge you like a bully. But when you do it back. They call you a bad sport. Inga says play smarter. You can't beat everyone. Sure, you may outrun someone but they always catch up. You cannot think someone but they always catch on. If they box you out you make a new box you make them play your game. Think of your team. What are your strengths? What are theirs? Now play smart. Not small. Think quick but think good. You have everything you need. Where's the rock? Focus, breathe, sprint, focus, leap, focus, dribble. Where are you in your head? No. You got to be two steps ahead of the strongest adversary. Be two steps ahead of anyone that tries to put you down because you're a girl. Being a black girl and being a black girl baller is a whole set of rules you never see coming. Know the rules. So you know which ones to break. Are you a baller? Then honor the baller. Play your position. Let your team be a team. Let them be their best selves. Your endurance is not your only ability. Your strength is not to run fast or ball the hardest. Your superpower is to see what your team needs and show up for them. Be agile because you can. You got to keep swinging little. You got to keep swinging because you're the real prize and those that respect you and love you will keep it 100. Won't play you small or play you at all. Remember, somebody sees you, even when the sky looks pitch black and you can't see the outline of your own hand, even when there are so many moving parts, and you can't find the man on your team. You never, you're never really alone. See a real leader knows there's no such thing as a one person team. If you think there is, you've already lost everything is a game. Some folks be playing to win the house, the job, the car, the spotlight. Everything is a game to be one, but some of us are playing for things that last longer than material things. Once you figure out what you're gaming for, then you can play honest and with integrity. If you show up and show the world your real self, you don't have to wait for others to claim you. You don't have to wait for others to pick you. You pick yourself. I mean, really, choose yourself every day. Thanks, y'all. Thank you, Mo. It is such an honor to be part of this dream lineup of icons and kin. I remember maybe like, right over 10 years ago at this point. The poets read at the New York in every couple of weeks when I can manage to get in and stay up late enough. And so it really means so much to me that all these years have passed and that we are still writing and still kin and still sharing space and I hope to continue to do so for 1020 3040 a billion more years with people so thank you so much. So I'm going to read a couple things. I'm going to read from a home is not a country, which is my new baby a novel and verse. And then, but first I'm going to read what my friend Angel calls a Lucy, which is just a poem that's not in any particular book right now, because that's the only way they get to be in the world really. So this is called arms length, though to a child of fleeing people. My husband has never held his name and body at arms length at an airport. We looked at maps, taking turns with the middle seat, some are in old cities, held hands at the airport. In that famous city of romance we folded in with the other immigrants, spiced food and blue smoke, Shisha a perfume in the air. Portmanteau is a game we played in transit. The mischief found in Christopher. I left loving that old city, even when I was searched at the airport. When we were first married, he would dream of all the places we might live security arriving again after I'd boarded to remove me from the airplane for a third search. My clothes scattered around the jet bridge, shame swelling in my throat. It's a joke by now, the Muslim at the airport. All the places we might live health care and a metro. Do we speak the language cost of renting an apartment. It's proximity to an airport twice already pregnant. My mother on a long ago flight turbulence and nausea and return for passports for her children are ease in every airport while she stayed behind to be searched headscarf in the wrong papers. My brother and I American and killing time, eating fast food at the airport. After that election, after each new video where we die, we consider our ancestral work of leaving board of destinations like a menu at the airport. At the airport. He has his heart set on it that city, my husband, it's long afternoon sunset two hours before midnight, and I can't. It was one time, but still the airport. They hate Muslims in that country. I eventually say my exalted passport just paper, ugly shade of blue, and everywhere in the world, the airport the place where it is most plainly said, but not the only. So where is there for us to go for me and mine. Name I cannot help and cannot hide what it reports. And now it feels so far away that place that portal. I surprised myself by longing, the world, everyone, everything I love kept from me on the other side of an airport. So home is not a country is about 14 year old Neema who grows up in diaspora and full of questioning and has to go on a journey through space and time only to come back and realize what was there all along which is her people and her family. So I want to introduce you to some of her people I think would be the best use of this time. This first poem is called nostalgia monster. Haytham calls me a nostalgia monster and likes to laugh at the dream brain that takes over mine when I hear the old songs and run my fingers over the old photographs. I know the words to the old films and imagine myself gliding in to join the dance glamorous in black and white photographed in sepia frozen in a perfect time. I wish our Arabic teacher would tell us more about what it was like back then before everyone left when they were young and dreaming and hearing the songs crackling out of a radio. But I cannot imagine him young or dancing cannot imagine him any way except the way we know him now scowling over conjugations and how we mispronounce the language, how it wilts on our American tongues. One of my favorites is a say Khalifa song where he sings to a girl he calls a pearl necklace. And says, where are the beautiful ones? Where did they go? And I think he means us, all the ones who left, all the gone. Haytham lives in my building, which isn't actually surprising since it seems everyone from our country immigrated to the same block of crowded apartments. It's Saturday morning and he's ringing the doorbell frantic and falls inside when I answer sweaty and rumpled and still in his house shoes, coughing with a little joke in his eye. His grandmother, opening his t-shirt drawer to put away the laundry, found his secret pack of cigarettes, which he doesn't even really smoke, which he tried to explain away while dodging the slippers aimed at his head. Who knew Mama Fathaya was so athletic? Everything always so funny to him. She chased him out with cries of disgusting, disgusting, and where else was he going to go? My mother hasn't left yet for work and makes us tea boiled in milk, poured into mismatched mugs, and hands as packs of Captain Majid cookies she gets from the big gala that Haytham and I call ethnic Walmart, where we buy everything, from bleeding legs of lambs to patterned pillow covers, and cassettes covered in a layer of dust. She never seems old enough to be anyone's mother, so pretty and unlined and smelling always of flowers. She clears the cups and wipes the crumbs from the table and our faces in quick movements, pins her scarf around her face and leaves for work. Haytham isn't wearing shoes, so we cannot go outside. We instead spend the day playing our favorite game, calling all our people's typical names out the window into the courtyard. Mama, of course I know my mother is lonely. Her days and nights spent mostly in the company of ghosts. So much of who and what she's loved she speaks of only in past tense, though mostly she keeps quiet. I can't help but imagine that her life was enormous before we came here, loud and crowded and lively as any party, and then the final notes of the song, and everyone is gone, except me. And I feel my own smallness as I try to fill her life's empty spaces, though they gape around me like the one pair of her high-heeled shoes I used to love to play with when I was little. So much of our life feels like a table set for dozens who will never again arrive, the two of us surrounded by empty chairs. My mother is lonely, and I am her daughter, her only. I think that might be why I'm lonely too. Baba, I think if he'd lived, my father would have been a famous singer, crooning and preening in a shiny suit, his hair dense and dark, or maybe an artist throwing clay onto a potter's wheel and shaping creatures from its mass like some sort of smaller god, or maybe an athlete, muscle in vain, courting in his still strong legs, a scientist serious in goggles and white, a writer pulling stacks of books from his nodded brain, a television star, his face so familiar, he's almost everyone's father, but always mostly mine, coming home in the evenings to swing me up onto his back and run circles until I'm dizzy, holding my hand in his callous grasp, teaching me the songs he loved, the songs he danced to with my mother, unwidowed and smiling with all her teeth, twirled in the living room, dressed billowing over her calves, loved, both of us belonging to someone, tied together by the belonging, by my father, my father, no longer gone. And then this last little excerpt is called, I can find it, it's called Hatham, again. When I met you, we were so small, so miraculously unhurt, unawoken by the dreams that make our mothers scream out at night, the whole world our private joke, the whole world a playground for our twinned brains, your perfect heart, its daily forgiveness of my uglier one. When I met you I had a father, or at least I had the dream of one, to lull me every night to sleep, photos to study, to imagine, separated only by the spirit world's veil, a father who would choose me and who would have, if he could have, stayed, but now I have so much more, I have so much to tell you, wake up, I have so much left to say. When I met you, we were such children, believing neither of us could ever die, won't you wake up, wake up, and believe it with me again. And then I will close on a final Lucy, because I am in the process of revising this poem and it would be very helpful for me to hear it out loud, so I'm going to use y'all, thank you. This is called Final Weeks 1990. Hours before, the night outside is black as my grandmother's hair, it's newborn moon and Sagittarius. And in the Maryland house, my mother is 23 behind a winning hand of cards as the water darkens the length of her skirt. December now and friends still call her Al-Arus, the bride, 10 months married and the shock of it not yet settled behind her eyes. Morning and the baby has not come, milky winter sun in Sagittarius. I should mention there was a husband, 27. I can hardly imagine it, a boy that age, my father. I cannot picture him in the room, though his work for years to come will absorb him into countries that smell of blood. Maybe he's in the room now, not yet a specter. I sketch him in but do not know where to put him, maybe in the corner, back rigid against the white wall. I cannot imagine them ever touching. I smudge him out, correct the still wet scene. He is outside, long-limbed in a hard plastic chair. My mother called him Jack and this is my only proof they were in love. My mother is almost my mother now, darker color of the noontime sun. In the waiting room I should also place my grandparents, peregrine species in the stark white hallway, though they are both elegant in that old overformal way of immigrants. My grandfather's shirt never without a collar, lush neatness of the afro against his head. My grandmother could pass for a film star, hair black and feathered down her back, any suggestion of curl or coil since burnt away and set every morning in hot rollers. Her eyebrows tattooed as they have been all my life, blue-black parentheses, bride for whom my grandfather wrote long poems in classical Arabic, praising the moon in her face. Both of them older siblings to the independent state of the Sudan. My grandmother 13 years it's senior. My grandfather a January child of unknown birthday, though the colonial offices recorded as 1930, 26 years before his country is born. I do not know if they are in love, but they are placid companions. Their courtship cooled amicably into a sort of siblinghood, and I have never seen them touch so I cannot imagine it now. I assemble her in another chair while he paces the cool length of the hallway. One hour and 39 minutes past noon, that final diluvian push and I am outside, full head of wet hair, pomegranate creature calling that little animal sound, pronounced a girl and named for a dead great aunt, the birth certificate dated and signed in ink. Back home I would have been known by my first two names, mine and my father's, Safia Yaagub. The surname rarely used, but in the new country the paper demands a patronin. Anglicized, the L becomes a looser L. Hello, meaning sweet, strange, unserious alonym of that first great grandfather, and crowded together on a single line marked first name, our names, mine and his, Safia Yaagub, little echo of that forgotten epithet, that once loved man, of Jack. And though I am not named from my mother, we match, Safa, noun form of my adjective, our shared first syllable, closest I have ever seen them, him and her, almost touching. Thank you. Wow. Roaring applause for you both, you know. I really implore to anybody tuning in to ask questions. I'm curious, what is it like in the trenches of universe making and novel writing, how was that experience, what was it like kind of building protagonists, especially protagonists that, you know, had to almost survive, you know, or survive a lot of work, kind of perpetually in pain? How did you, how did you all find that process? So I'd never written, like not even just fiction, I'd never really written narrative before this. So it was such an education and such a treat to have, first of all, a cast of characters and a protagonist who is not me, to kind of guide me through the poems because it kind of, I feel like I had to get to know a new person and then based on what I had come to know about this new person, like making a friend, then like put her in a bunch of situations that I myself have never been in. I've never or not yet time traveled or anything. So then being like based on what I know about my new friend, Nima, how, how do we get out of this? What would she do? How would she get out of this? And it was nice having that kind of guiding light of this new person in my life. I like that. I definitely used my time coming up. I use a specific incident that sparked what would become chlorine sky, which was a poem called blurred vision about the moment where I was at a swimming pool with the best friend. And I heard some people making fun of me specifically a dude she liked. And she didn't stand up for me. And so just that one moment began a poem. And then the poem had this narrative that that was allowed, I don't know to live without resolve, because I was writing in the 3030 and you know sometimes you just got let it ride. And in that moment I just like told a story about the snapshot. I just told a story about that one moment and nothing else. And it became the foundation for this universe that this chlorine sky. So what I then had to do was pull a whole bunch of inspiration from being a teaching artist in New York City from, you know, playing ball and open. I had to pull from all parts of my life as both someone who's who's lived it but also someone who's witnessed other people living it. And that's how it really, it really took it took on its own, you know, its own way. There were moments where I was right and I was like, Oh, I didn't even expect that to happen but it, but it's obvious that it was happening you know with or without me. And I really just had to make sure that the arc was was, you know, intact that the story was cohesive, even if folks don't agree with the story right we're talking about so many different things that poems allow you to do. And then the small, you know, bit of literary text. So I just wanted to make sure that they're all of those you know a little loose ends. If they were loose it was because you as the reader are still interrogating what it means to you, but more so it allowed this universe to be like expansive and grow and also like you know snap back like elastic because there is no right answer. It's really just about the excavation. Um, we do we do have a question but I have to be selfish and we got two questions from dollars but I have to be selfish. Just as one more little question on my on behalf of my curiosity. You know, you know, one time I heard a, I got to see Jasmine Ward talk before. And she said that one thing she had to get over was this overwhelming urge to kind of to protect her characters, like she would protect her loved ones and, you know, in real life. Did you did did you both have to do that dance as well. How did you find that. So, I think, okay, my, my, I was not fighting with killing the darlings is what they call them right like you just got to like, let the story be what it's going to be. And I heard Jasmine Ward also talk about that tension of like the difference between her first book and then her her second book which won the National Book Award salvage the bones where she was like I wanted to protect these young boys growing up in Mississippi, that I didn't let the story really take on full flight. And you can feel that. So I didn't want to get caught in it, but I wanted to be mindful of the readership. I'm not interested in like, you know, glorifying trauma, but I'm also not trying to ignore that it happens which is why it comes in there when I'm talking about people getting beat down and, you know, this is how rumors start. We have discussions about consent I'm talking about you know the impact of mass incarceration and single parent households and sibling rivalries which also can be quite traumatic, especially as you grow and you realize like some of the most harm is done between like siblings if you ain't right to each other yeah. So I didn't want to shy away from it, but I also didn't want to to paint that I didn't want to paint the picture so what I don't know what the word is direct. I didn't want to do all of that work so that the reader couldn't find themselves in the shoes of the protagonist, which is why I don't even say her name until the end. Folks don't know her name until the end of the act like the last page, because I want them to read it and feel like oh I've seen this or, or that feels weird or I know something like this is it's enough room for folks to like find them like their lives in it. What I tried to do is build for my protagonist, a community of people who could keep her safe, because I can't do it I'm out here, you know, they're they're all in there together, taking care of each other is is my hope. So I tried to build a world in which, you know, none of us can be particularly protected from the ways in which the world outside is violent and scary, but it makes such a difference. When you're like in a community or in a home life where it doesn't replicate the violences of the world outside and I think the fact that like, she does have a strong, like unconventional the strong family unit in a community and like a homie and just like people that she is safe with I think I didn't want to replicate the harm that the world causes her in in her like smaller home worlds. That felt important to me, but I think the limitation that I myself kept coming up against is. I just kept putting her in situations that I myself would not know how to get out of if I were in it were so much of like what needs to happen in this book for the next level to be achieved is for a difficult conversation to be had. And I am I hate conflict I don't ever want to have a difficult conversation with anybody. So every time it came time to write these like tough candid conversations between these two characters I'd be like, how does one do such a thing. Why don't you teach me. I definitely got caught out on that at one point. One of my my my beta readers so to speak, was like that all this all this hoopla for them being not best friends, and that's all she got to say. No, I don't believe it made me go back and be like, you know what I mean like you have to face that in a way that's as humane is human as possible. I just want to be our best selves right, but I definitely was like, just say sorry. Okay, thank you. All right, the best friends is like, absolutely not not buying it. I feel you on the confrontation. Yeah, let me squeeze some of these. Some of these viewers questions in here. Poetry feels so intimate when spoken and can be exposing and healing. What rituals do you have for self care. Soundbow meditation now I'm really getting good at it. I love it. And it's just once a day just just a moment to like center myself and bring myself back. Shout out to I'm on a who got me my first sound bowl she was like, this is the one that you want to do it. And at first I felt like an imposter I'm like I don't know about this. And then I'm what am I doing. And then it was like you know you watch enough tutorials. I did enough minutes three minute meditation so on on the YouTube. And then I just geared it for my own writing space like what is the word I want to reverberate this space while I'm writing and I would say that word and I'd hit it and, and let that ringing like, you know, resound everywhere like through my body through my mind. And that little moment it's no more than five minutes gave me so much life. That I kind of returned to that that warm feeling in my chest, when I don't even feel like writing when I just want to watch Real Housewives of Atlanta or something. I remember the word I'm like I got to go back go finish that one draft, you know. I love that. I am in therapy, which I love. It took me long enough. And I think the lesson that I had to learn the hard way is that I cannot be processing something for the first time out loud in a performance context server and full strangers that like I can I'm not going to be okay if that's how I'm like, like, having these like epiphanies. So now I actually feel quite safe in my poems, even though they do deal with difficult subject matter or whatever, because it's not by the time I am reaching it in a poem, I have tools to like, make myself okay around it. So I'm not ever, I don't ever feel like I'm putting myself in harm's way in the poem. And I can like put my autobiographical I threw a lot in a poem. It's because I've like worked it out first in the designated space for that thing and not just like my parading my open wounds around anymore. So much to follow up with the question. Number two from the viewers. How did you make your craft choices when infusing language and culture, what felt necessary. I'm more concerned about being authentic. Like even if it sounds like broken English or improper English. Young people don't always speak with, you know, English clash English class or the job interview in mind they speak with their blood they speak with their bones they speak with breath, and that sometimes you know it loses a couple of syllables to assure that you hear me across and I'm yelling for you, you know, to be safe. I want it to be as authentic as possible to neighborhood language, because it is a valid language. Shout out to West Oakland, the Valley. So as well. Well, mission all day. Um, so I, I don't know if this is any more like a craft choice on my part it started out that I was in an MFA workshop and I was. I was trying to mess with people because I was in a space where I did not feel safer happy or understood it so I started putting large chunks of untranslated Arabic text in my poems, and we just bring them to workshop because I was fed up work for it. Thank you. And so now it's just something that it like feels good for me to do in the poem because I like for the poem. To it kind of enacts a thing that I feel like I'm doing a version of where the poem has two lives there is a version of it, where if. If you don't know the world that I'm talking about or the language that I'm using to talk about it with. There's still like enough English or whatever around that that I think there's a version of the poem that can still live and that someone can interact with. And then there's like the 2.0 version of the poem but the treat version of the poem that is addressed specifically to people who occupy my exact linguistic intersection so you so there's like the interplay of English and Arabic and the word comes out and honestly whatever language it occurred to me in and I like to make a record of that in the poem and then there is that other version of the poem. Where you know, I think for so much of my life I felt like I had to get fully fluent in one language or the other and just commit, and it just never happened for me, I kind of like speak half of each still. And so I want to, I wanted to make it feel like a real language for myself where I was like this is, I don't really have a say about it because this is the language that I speak so I might as well start making poems in it in this way. And then there will maybe be like a handful of other people who also speak that language with me, and this version of that poem is for those people, but it also like. But being able to speak Arabic is like a prerequisite of being able to engage with my poems, also like not everyone who's from where I'm from necessarily speaks or reads Arabic so I still want there to be a version of the poem that can be like lived in an interactive with throughout but that kind of the two versions I feel like is now a craft choice but at first I just was mad. Lightening around real quick one minute to go as poets what other poets fuel your flow like that. Classic, I would say Sister Sonya Sanchez for sure you hear the repetition throughout chlorine sky that is a direct reflection of the work that the black artist movement has done for us and contemporary. Oh, all the youth Poloria it's a pretty dope tangos good Sophia is good. Like, I'm really lucky to be surrounded by like icons, so I feel bad even putting out one because I just turned to their poems all the time. Let's see my I feel like my. I don't know if I have like, I feel on the spot to make it top five, but come out brothway I think has been one of my most important teachers and I feel like I live those lessons every time I sit down to write and thinking about the poem or the word or the sentence as a unit of sound and that the language that I speak as a valid language to make poetry in. I hear my rights the poems that I wish I could write but I can't write them so I just read them when she writes them. Patricia Smith, in particular, especially the the poems that kind of blossomed into this novel in her book should have been Jimmy Savannah she has a poem called any and Otis Otis and any and I've been trying to write a version of that poem, since I read it. For the first time as a college undergrad, so I feel like every project I make is I'm like alright here's my prompt once again, let me try and make this home. I still have not ever come anywhere close but it's been very generative for me. That about does it for for our hour. Thank you both for coming for coming through and blessing us. Let me say something real quick just real real quick just I know people have seen, you know what happened in Atlanta, and it's, you know, anti Asian violence that there's running the muck right now, and the anti black violence that continues in the anti brown and all this For all of us I think like, you know, it is a it is a desperate time for unity. And, you know, with this kind of rising neo Confederate tide, it just continues to consolidate itself and so like, you know, in order to really get us to a new epoch, you know, so I just encourage. Just shout out to unity. And may we, and may we incorporate more of it into our practices and have this and, you know, solidarity with with those suffering from violence right now. Word. Yes, thank you tango for that very thoughtful and wonderful and to the beautiful readings that you all have shared and in your thoughts thank you so much for your generosity, all of you in your insights and sharing your work. It's really remarkable to have you all together with us and thank you to everyone in the audience to students teachers poets readers, everyone who's come up out today. Just as a reminder as we wrap up you can find these writers amazing books through SFPL to go. And if you love today's program check out our events calendar for more her story programs in our virtual library. This week we're putting the spotlight on the women construction team building the tunnel tops and the Presidio, and later talking with the famous feminist group the gorilla girls. Very excited for these upcoming programs. Until then, everyone take good care. Stay safe and hope to see you back at the virtual library again soon.