 All right, I'm going to go ahead and give the library introduction and you know we really we're going to keep it super short and turn it over to the poets today, but we really want to mostly thank you all for being here today and taking the time out of this, you know rare sunny Sunday Saturday, and thank you all for just being here today and celebrating the amazing life and legacy that was Janice Merrick Katani. And I live very close to the Tenderloin and I work at the main library so their work goes noticed every single day around here. We want to welcome you to the unceded land of the Eloni tribal people and acknowledge the many raw Mutish Eloni tribal groups and families as the rightful stewards of the lands on which we live work and play in our Bay Area. Our library is committed to uplifting the names of these families and we encourage you to learn more about first person culture, land rights, and I will put some chats links into the chat that has a great reading and resource list we created about first person culture. I'll also put a link to this document and I'll update it it has all of our speakers websites and socials and links to their Biblio Commons which is our catalog so you can find the poets poetry. And with that, I want to turn it over to Kim Shuck and Lauren Eto, Lauren Eto. Lauren is a poet and an artist and an amazing amazing organizer, and we are so blessed to have both Kim and Lauren here with us today. Lauren take it over. Shall I stop sharing now. Perfect. Thank you so much, Anisa for that introduction and special thank you to San Francisco Public Library as well as seven poet laureate and co host Kim Shuck for ensuring that this event in the space is possible today. One of us who knew Janice or were impacted by her work. It's no secret that Janice Mirkatani was very much a force of transformation. She lived fiercely. She lived tenderly and with love that couldn't help but ignite transformation and others. In a moment when I was personally experiencing a lot of grief Janice wrote to me with the following words. Remember tears do water the seeds of transformation within us. I turn to Janice's words very often, essentially as in the wake of her passing most recently, and I offer these words to you all with the hopes that they may be supportive in some way as we move through our journeys of celebrating Janice's life, legacy, and her memory today. It is now my honor to introduce co host seventh poet laureate of San Francisco mentor and dear dear friend Kim Shuck, who was very much a catalyst for today's event. So thank you so much Kim, and please take it away. I'm really moved by the fact by the number of people who are here I'm not surprised in any way. I wasn't terribly close with Janice but when we work together we work together very intensely. So I feel like I knew her very well in short pieces if that makes any sense. And one of the things that I just was really struck by working with her was her incredible just generosity of spirit. And I was thinking about the laureates and the way that we function within the city. Various ways we function within the city and the way that we did not need a process for mourning one of past laureate until last fall. In the middle of when everybody was in stress over so many other things. And I'm just I'm hoping that we can just have a moment together today to think on Janice and her legacy because obviously some of her work is going to continue. Absolutely really strongly going forward the work that she's done at glide with Cecil and in the community, obviously moves forward. And I feel like her poetry moves forward in an entirely different way and I know that each of us has been seen in different ways in terms of the balance between the poetry and the activism. And I feel like sometimes Janice's activism is understood more clearly, maybe then her poetry, but I really have read through everything I had of hers. Over the last week and I feel like it's a good moment to take to think about her poetry as well and just her incredible passionate love that she that she carried around with her so rather than continuing to babble. I'm going to turn it back over to Lauren so that she can introduce Sandy. So next to share about Janice will be Sandy Mori, who was a close friend of Janice's and fellow organizer for well over 50 years. Sandy Mori is now retired from the field of nutrition and health policy, and she does a lot of work with the Japanese American community, including the dignity fund coalition and advocacy groups for seniors adults with and adults with disabilities. She's also organized a lot in the city alongside Janice, doing a lot of initiatives both in Japan town across the city and more broadly beyond. So without any further ado I will pass it to Sandy Mori to share a little bit about Janice's legacy of organizing work in the city and stories celebrating her memory. Hey Sandy we can't hear you just yet. I'm going to ask on you. Oh, perfect. Take it away. Can you hear me. Yes. It is the pleasure to be with all of you today. Jan has been my dear friend for 57 years. We're both Sansei third generation Japanese American. We were both incarcerated in concentration camps in World War two. I was born in Tule Lake, California camp, and Jan was in Roar, Texas, Roar Arkansas camp. We've been driving force in our community for all these years, having supported community based organizations such as Kimochi Japanese Community Youth Council and the home at the street fair. Her poetry is shown throughout our community. She has a poem on a bronze landmark in the Japan town peace Plaza here in San Francisco, Japan town. She has written a poem, a tribute to journey to Tan Fran. In 1997, she wrote a special 50th anniversary celebration of the Osaka sister city with San Francisco. In fact, that Osaka sister city is the oldest sister city relationship in San Francisco. In 2019, Jen was honored by our then Council General Tomochika Uyama, who presented her with a foreign ministers commendation for her contributions to strengthen US Japan relations. Her community activism and being a leader in arts and poetry were highlighted in that commendation. In 2001, Jan published a book called Love Works, and she autographed that we that book for me, and she wrote a note, which said, excuse me. Dear Sandy, long ago, you shown a light teaching me how my grandmother's love works. I think we carry on. You are a mirror reflecting my fear and power. You are the wind lifting our wings. You are earth grounding us solidly like love works one step at a time. I love you. Thank you. Janice will forever be in my heart. And may you rest in peace and power, my dear friend. Thank you. Thank you so much for those words, Sandy. And for sharing a note that was so personal, but that also reflected the influence and relationship that you both have had in one another's life. So thank you. And with that, I will pass it to Kim, who will introduce our next speaker. You guys are going to have me losing it by the end of this, you know. I'd like to give some time to Dr. Mary Wardell. Dr. Jared Dutzi, who is the president of the library commission was quite close to Janice. And Janice wrote the intro to Dr. Jared Dutzi's book twice as good leadership and power for women of color. Dr. Jared Dutzi. Thank you so much, Kim. And thank you so much for all of you for being in this space and just organizing a gathering to remember one of the giants that walked among us, even though she was petite in her frame, she was mighty, and her spirit, as well as in her words. So I knew Janice on several levels. I first became aware of her as a graduate student at San Diego State University. When I went to a program that was a master's degree in cross cultural counseling with a focus on social justice education. And we had to do a deep dive in the third world counselor movement, which really originated as we know in San Francisco in the Bay Area. And a name came up and there were writings that came up in some of the early journals as graduate students that we were unearthing to try to understand the, how the movement moved work forward but particularly the multi racial coalition building that was happening in San Francisco, the Bay Area and also in Los Angeles. And that was the first time I remember. And I was a, I was a young adult I had by that time I had already had one of my daughters, but the first time I remember reading the name of Janice Mericatani. First about reading about her as being a leader in the movement. And what her role and then I was introduced to her as a as a poet fast forward some years later and I ended up in 2008 in San Francisco, where I came to serve as associate vice president and dean of students at the University of San Francisco. And then over a period of time I ended up being appointed as the institutions inaugural vice provost for diversity and community engagement. And one of the things that we did is that once I found out who she was, I was able to see her and glide and meet her in person, we're able to have her be one of the founding scholars, social justice scholars but they were really kind of elders in the community, and had it was really for people who had a deep and broad experience of understanding how movements work. And we brought different people and she was one of the second people that we brought in, and she taught a class, and the name of her class I had to pull it up again, it was called because it's Jen, it was a beautiful poetry class. It was entitled poetry and poverty, and then it had the subtitle I can't see, oh here it is. Poetry and poverty transformation from dust and an explored poverty and oppression through poetry personal narrative and community engagement, and you can imagine those students that were in that class. And they said that they had never had any type of teaching and learning experience like that in their lives. And then we were fortunate to for Jan to accept the honor of being a commencement speaker and receiving an honorary doctorate in the December of 2015 from the University of San Francisco. Before that Jan and I continue to be friends, all that engagement, I'm doing diversity work and an institutional forefront and then I end up becoming appointed and serving as a commissioner in the public library which I continue today. What there's another piece of connection that Jan and I had and we both are children and daughters of the city of Stockton. When I came, I was born in the 60s and we know that Jan was born earlier, but as Sandy has already shared. I was born in Stockton, and during that period of time, not only were all the Japanese Americans in turn all up and down the state of California, specifically they lost their properties they they lost their homes and in the case of Jan they lost their family farm. And so, one of the things that even as I now have transitioned from the University of San Francisco and I'm back at my home school University of the Pacific, which is located in Stockton. I was down in the archives just this week because I knew that this was a weekend of preparing for, you know, jam, Jan's home Jan's home going and acknowledging her. And I asked the University archive archivist if he could take me to any archives that we had of the Japanese Americans of the city of the that were moved from the city of Stockton. And there were these photos they were all from the camp in Arkansas, and I was looking through them to try to see if I could find any of those that would be evidence of the America Tony family and I was wasn't able to at that time but I'm going to continue to do so. But there was something about her coming through the same ground that I came through, and there's something there was a deep connection that we had as sisters, sisters from a city that was in many times is considered the most city, and he had been that for a long time throughout California and the United States but yet the same time, some of the deepest inequities and transgressions has happened in the city of Stockton Dolores Worth also was from and spent time here when she was able to name it and so there was something about Jan that I knew that I saw in myself as she dedicated her life to these ideas of trying to do what was right by those that have been marginalized and left behind in society. Now one of the last pieces of work that she had published I don't know if it's her last but this book that I published was published in 2020. And Janice and her loveliness. I pushed her because she had so much on her plate, but she wrote a forward for me and little did I know that. Yeah, little did I know that we would lose her so soon but I'm so grateful for her words and having Janice America Tony poet and activist on the cover of my book but I just want to write read you the pope. I the book opens in a poem written by by Jan because that's what we do right. It's about women of color so and it opens with a woman of color who, to me is one of the baddest that ever lived and we're from the same city and we're doing the same work so Jan had to. Nobody else for me but Janice America Tony, and this is how the book opens with the poem that she wrote she says, I am not afraid to be black as midnight. Gold is pollen honey, red is cinnamon, Sipia brown or cinnamon red, yellow, red, Sipia, Cola, cinnamon. I am not afraid to be hungry, I am not ashamed of the curve of my back, I am not afraid to be hated. I deserve to love myself and give this love to others without fear of rejection. I am not afraid to be joyful, and I am not ashamed to be proud. Very quickly because I know I just want to share just a little bit of what she wrote in her forward. She, she gives me some accolades but then she goes on into some other good stuff. She says we are a country of dreamers. How tragic that in this nation of diverse populations purported equal opportunity and access to its established institutions and justices and inequality persist in the most pernicious world. The barriers that feel impenetrable for people of color, specifically women of colors, especially in the workplace in many arenas where racism and misogyny or practice have become so sophisticated in their institutionalization that their structures have become the accepted norm. We have faced over these decades and in particularly in the past three years, a country divided and torn by self interest and greed. We experience and witness a vast number of poor and middle income people fearful of losing basic rights to health care, food and housing and housing security. And with an administration, blatantly permissive to white supremacist and racist hate crimes, one that is mocked, disrespected and demeaned women, and has terrorized an entire nation of new and undocumented immigrants, and even naturalized citizens. The tremors of unrest and protest grow and with them we see the rising up of women and a wave of women of color who more than ever are running for more national offices. With a chance of women's marches, hashtag me to hash time times up black lives matter movements and young people protesting against gun violence, as the encouraging wind in their backs. San Francisco's old mayor, Mayor London breed is a shining example of a woman of color who's raised in the poverty and the projects of the black community, and who has risen to succeed and lead a major city. And she goes on she talks about me but I really want to focus on her. And one of the things that she says is she talks about what glide meant and what it represented. And then she goes on to say my experiences that glide have taught me that change begins with oneself and the values of respect unconditional acceptance and love of all people no matter what our differences must become the culture of organizations and society. And such the hearts and minds of people in order for them to believe they can change the circumstances of their lives and help make a difference in the lives of others who need innovative opportunities to break the cycle of oppression. Social justice for all are meaningless words if we do not embrace a cultural of respecting the complexities of what it means to succeed. One size does not does not fit all women women of color. They have and continue to experience the difficulties of overcoming racial and gender diminution. And here's an interesting thing I like this part and ironically she goes on to say women of color have always been powerful they have a loom the path to freedom from slave plantations. They have survived concentration concentration camps with dignity and perseverance. They have nurtured new immigrant children and hostile communities they have raised up to be who we truly are with all the rich cultural and racially powerful still in our backs I love that. And it is America who has not recognized this power and continues to undermine the ways in which people of color and women particularly can truly break through siblings and which limits our possibilities. And she goes on to give me a little shout out and she says that the wisdom that I have is need a man now more than ever. And she trusts that in these coming years and decades that we will all become twice as powerful as we center the needs of those that are the most marginalized in society. Those are the words of our sister Janice America Tony, published in 2020, and I just want to thank you so much for allowing me to be a part of this space. Thank you so much. Yeah, she was quite amazing that way. Our next or first poet poet. The four major, who was the third poet laureate of San Francisco is a very good friend and one of my mentors and I was good friends with Janice. Welcome. Yeah. Yesterday. I'm unmuted right. Yesterday. I was looking for poems of Janice's to read and I found myself to I was like reading the notes that she wrote to me and it made me feel I guess warm and less alone so I'm reading this one. Poem from out of dust, and her note in it. She's just so wonderful. You're my inspiration for all of it. All of it. The poems of your poetry and the inspirational love for us all love you Janice. I just, you know, she she always was so supportive of all of us. I am one of the many, many, many people that she said yes, go on keep going keep doing I am not special in that I am blessed in that she was part of my world. And here's a poem from out of the dust. And it's we the dangerous. I swore it would not devour me. I swore it would not humble me. I swore it would not break me. They commanded me, we dwell in the desert, our children be spawn of barbed wire and barracks. We closer to the earth squat short side, knowing the dust better, and they would have us make the garden rake the grass to soothe their feet. We akin to the jungle, plotting with the snake tails shedding in civilized America, and they would have a skin their fish, deft hands like blades, shining, sliding back flesh, bloodless. Who awake in the river, oceans child whale eater, and they would have us strange scented women round shoulders strong and yellow, like the moon to pull the thread to the cloth to loosen their backs, massaged in myth. We who till the secret bed, the sweatshops, the laundries, and they would dress us in napalm, skin shred to clothe the earth, bodies filling pot marked fields, dead fish bloating our harbors. We the dangerous dwelling in the ocean akin to the jungle close to the earth Hiroshima, Vietnam, Tully Lake, and yet we were not devoured, and yet we were not humbled, and yet we are not broken. Thank you, Devorah. Our next reader is Jack Hirschman, the fourth poet laureate of San Francisco, massively published, well respected organizer and activist. Welcome, Jack. Okay. Hi, hi, wall and no old friends to and comrades, and I'm going to read an arcane. It's in three parts. The Janice mirikitani arcane one, you were born February 4. The same day as my sister in New York, you in California. But unlike you, she didn't spend her first years in a concentration camp in Arkansas. As the daughter of Japanese American parents in mated there by the same fascist white supremacist orders that step on the faces of blacks, browns and Asians in these pandemic days. Without doubt, those years in the camp contributed to your becoming a poet. When I first heard you read in San Francisco 45 years ago, I thought your poems were among the finest of communal and political soul that I felt in the streets of the beat 1970s. And as you and Cecil Williams, open the doors of glide to the tenderloin poor, you went to work with hip hoppers wrappers and cracked open the heads of tenderloin crackers pouring your common soul sense as a healing anodyne against the addictions and AIDS that was spreading everywhere. You were that feminine light all over the loin that cast hope on the poor and return them to the dignity that was there to. Oh, Jan. How even deaths missing you because you can't under any weather ever have died. Oh, Jan. How all of us are already missing the grace elegance and vivacity. And then you embrace people with who've been the second poet laureate of San Francisco, a city that feels a powerful dimension of profound loss, one of its grand women of our time. Sister to many of sister to many come that you lived all the days of your life and wrote of with all of your deathless heart. And today, rest forever in the 17 stillable breath in love with you with all the hike is ever written surrounding you. And blessed song. Thank you, Jack. It's beautiful. Next up we have Alejandro Maria. The sixth poet laureate of San Francisco. Somebody that I worked with. I'm a writer at SF State. And long term friend of Janice also Alejandro welcome. Thanks, Kim, and thanks to all the people from the library, and the literary community and the community in general, who helped put together this event, and to add to that. Honestly, Janice doesn't belong just to the literary community, but to all of San Francisco. And so I'm very happy about the memorial that they will have tomorrow for her at Glap church, I believe, and to also an agreement with another comment. Janice was absolutely a giant amongst us, and not just because of the high heels she wore. And so I had known Janice from about 1973, 1974, when we were doing literary community work right using poetry in our politics to organize in San Francisco, and to create with other third world writers, you know, Latinos like Roberto Vargas and Nino Serrano, myself with Janice Marigatani, Seraphine Secchia, also, and African American writers like burial clay, and we had developed a group called third world communications, and people do not know that Janice was the editor of the first anthology ever published about third world women in the United States, and published by third world women as part of third world communications. And she was one of the editors. She was also very instrumental in publishing in the Asian American community editing series of anthologies, and later on, helping us publish through Glide Memorial Church. This anthology, time degrees, incantations from the third world, that was also one of the first compilations of third world writers. But beyond that, I think one of the biggest influences for me from Janice, when I was a young Brown buffalo, was watching her read, which were almost like performances, right? She was so brilliant on stage, her presence, just the way she would stand, her emphasis, how she would emphasize certain words. And I just learned a whole lot from Janice, excuse me, yeah. I was also very moved by the photo supper. And I was going to read one of my favorite poems, but since Deborah beat me to it, I don't think I can surpass that, right? But it's really a poem that everybody should read and one of those poems that really deserve to be memorized and read in other sites. Anyway, I'll read you some of her, you may not have heard this, it's from time degrees. And it's the very first poem in the anthology by, and it's by Janice America Tani, it's called Firepot. Different shores, languages turn, be located, immigrated and assimilated, Asian. We share a common struggle against those who would attempt to split our tongues, chock our minds, the common need to maintain who we are, to understand each other though we speak in different dialects and languages, though we are born from different roots, Korea, Japan, China, Samoa, Philippines, South Asia. We must experience our connections, Japanese American, Chinese American, Korean American, Filipino American, F O B, A B C. We have been fractured, made to look at each other as though we are divided. But we see with clear eyes, we know we are bound by common shackles, Manila to Vietnam, Korea to Laos, China to the islands, Hiroshima to Cambodia, Post Street to Hunters Point, Kearney Street to Richmond, Mission to the Valley, bound by our survival, bound by our strains, Firepot, a collective soup of many tastes and ingredients. We come together from our own cultures, races, and in this book, our individual flavors and seasonings, Firepot. The brothers and sisters in this section are only a sampling of our different flavors. They speak for themselves, sing their own rhythms, understand the meaning of the soul, beauty, pain beneath our yellow brown skin, rice, adobo, shashimi, imo, yuk, gai, long, kimchi, chicken feet, a pickled seed, choy, sum, and mango trees nourish us, hear it, smell it, feel it, taste it, time to grease. Thank you so much for sharing that beautiful poem. I had not heard that one before, so it was such a gift to experience. Thank you. And the next reader that I'm honored to introduce is Seventh Poet Laureate of San Francisco, Kim Shuck. Kim, as I mentioned, is an incredible organizer and activist, a dear mentor to me personally and very much someone who leaves community to ensure that many poets feel at home in this city. So thank you, Kim. Take it away. Thank you, Lauren. So Janice was interned along the river that my father's family lived next to for many years. And it's a sacred space for the native people who are there, and it's always been a personal pain that that space ended up getting repurposed as a prison. But we did talk about that very briefly. And I initially met her because she had asked around in Indigenous communities to have sort of a younger Indigenous poet, which I was at the time, come read at her millennial celebration. And it was an enormous honor. I was stunned when I got the phone call at the time. Because that's how we did that then. And she had me come down to Glide and read my poems that I was going to share to her and made incredible suggestions on how to make it better in this beautiful and generous and wonderful way. And it really, I was quite moved by that. And at the night of the event, there was a moment when a dancer who I know and Janice and myself were standing backstage and negotiating a moment. And this guy walked up and started doing a thing we now call mansplaining. And she looked at him and smiled at him in the most incredible way that just cut the feet right out from under the whole thing and he sort of trailed off mid sentence and wandered off. It was like the most beautiful and generous and elegant way I've ever seen that done. I can't match it, but I can absolutely admire it and even more so with more perspective. She was amazing and really dangerous. I wanted to read this poem because Well, maybe you'll see. I think it's what poets do. It's called looking for a poem it's from a wake in the river. And it starts off with an at the ground. I'm Pablo Neruda. What is Pablo up to. I'm here. In the street you'll find me there tuning my fiddle ready to sing and to die. I wander through the rubble of images cast aside rain swelling from old wood, a house smelling of generations now asleep. In the ancient dance for a birth, a broken hoe, pickled vegetables, fire of war, empty eyes, charred bones, the poem lies here somewhere as easy as a human kiss. But when I'm asked why not a love poem. Anger is easier. I search until too tired retreat to his words and he shouts, look for me in the streets. You'll find me there ready to sing or die. Search the earth. I never stretch the circumference. flew around the world like light and still had time to dance with lions, speak wisdom to the sun, admire the legs of women, leap fences with children and antelope plant songs in the trenches of Santiago, his words, like the stride of strong thighs, the nostrils of horses mating, the blood of women bearing the shoulders of soldiers in battle, the hands of the fiddler singing. Don't ask where is the love poem. Look, he's in the streets, ready to sing or to die. Thank you. I think we will. She says, those of you who know the dance of putting the glasses on and taking glasses off know that there is a second where you're going. I cannot see. Tonga was coming from another event. And as a result, unless that last message. Okay, so he's not managed to get here yet but he has absolute exemption for that because he is busy doing other things. I'm going to call up Eileen Casanero, who was one of the people who was commenting on Janice's writing right after we heard that she passed and the effect that it had had on her so the current poet laureate of San Mateo County, a good friend and really good colleague. Casanero. Welcome. Thank you, Kim. Hello, everyone. It's an honor to join you this afternoon. Thank you to the San Francisco library for hosting and boring and Kim for curating this event. I only met Janice once at a work related event after she was awarded the foreign ministers award at the residence of my former boss. I had a lot of time to talk but I managed to tell her how much her poetry and advocacy meant to me. And what I'll always remember about her was how truly kind she was. Her poetry reading is inspired by her poem. Why is preparing fish a political act. The best broth is made of guts for Janice Mary Katani who loved radically. The best broth is made of guts. All the good parts of the fish, bones, head, awful eggs, go into an old pot of simmering water, flavored with shoyu, ginger, dried kelp. I promise you, this broth is radical. Like her love was radical. Remember how it multiplied fish. How there was soup for all counting women and children. I promise you this broth is radical. Made of blood and guts. Nothing was thrown away. Her love. It was radical like that. She was fierce, unsqueamish. In all 50 blocks, she did not find a single scrap. Only the best parts. Heads, hearts and all. Won't you come and fill your bowl. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for that. I love the why preparing fish is a political act is one of my favorite poems. So it's really beautiful to hear your response to it. Thank you. Our next poet is Kimi Sugiyoka. Kimi Sugiyoka is the poet laureate of Alameda County and during an event that I had the honor of organizing thanks to Kim Shuck through the fire thieves. Kimi was one of the poets that read alongside Janice in a multi-generational event exploring identity and what it means to be Japanese through poetry. So it's very much an honor to introduce Kimi, who again incredible poet, organizer and laureate at Alameda County. Thanks Kimi for being here. Thank you Lauren. Thank you Kim. Thank you everyone for joining together in this memorial. I'm learning so much. Things I wish I'd known. Janice was born on my birthday. It turns out we're the same birthday. Anyway, my sadness is more because I didn't know her. She did have a profound effect on me when I was probably 20 and started reading her work. And she was the first Japanese American poet I read and it's like she gave me permission to write. So I'm eternally grateful for that. I've chosen a poem of hers from Shedding the Silence. It's a beautiful poem and I noticed that there were echoes of this in the poem that Alejandro Mourguer read. But it is a different poem. It is called Who is Singing This Song. I am the Oy River winding around fields full with rice waving bursting with women planting. I leave with spurts of wind spilling to the Pacific great passageway for small boats. Who is singing this song? I am the water and air that dances on your fingertips. The water swirling in precise pools that slake your thirst. Water with tempo measure murmur licking at your ear. Who is singing this song? I am a street veering connecting colliding with corners rolling up down hills. Smell me rice adobo sashimi imu juk gai long. Kimchi hear me. We survive by hearing. Who is singing this song? I am. We discover each other. Our small silences peel open like roses. We explore the layers of our fears. Will he? Will I? Will they? Will I not? We have so long undressed without light, ashamed of our size, the shape of our thighs, the sweep of our eyes. We survive by hearing. We ignite ourselves from inside. The light surrounds us and we are surprised. I seek where and how to touch. Who is singing this song? I am the hands of grandmother mother, sinned from work, blue vein like Magnolia's softest cloth, wiping away the sweat from men's shoulders, massaging the balms, the lotions deep into their backs. I look through family albums, the women's hands clasped like small bouquets, umiko, plum blossom child, shijimi, luxurious growth of beauty, haruko, beautiful spring, minoru, treasured sun, bearer of fruit. These hands have yielded me, palms open, allowing birth, tying cord, pulling knot, through immigration, segregation, tribulation, relocation, who is singing this song? I am a floating note on a koto, a thunderstorm, steady like taiko. I can be heard humming the blues in rice paddies and desert camps, unraveling barbed wire like silkworm thread. A woman dancing in the ocean swell, searching for pearls in the Pacific, I string them across my eyes, my skin the color of moonlight. I am your own, a child in dark streets, woman seeking safety in a world of shadows. I am the present, struggling to be free, a crusader in these spiritless prisons, pinnacles to greed and sterility. Who is singing this song? I am a survivor, a saboteur of stereotypes, image maker, an endless string of speech. We survive by hearing. We discover each other, each of us yielded by hands of the transplanted, the escapees, the adventurers, pregnant with dreams. We explore our similar histories, we ignite ourselves from inside, our hands are warmed alive. Who is singing this song? I am pulled by hands of history to not sit in our times complacently, walk man's plug to our ears, computer pronounce, so proper as lulling us to sleep. We are required by these hands of history to be a storm of hands that wave in protest against apartheid, assaults, invasions, indifference to the poor, a storm of hands that dismantle the amexes and the tridents and the Pershings and the cruise missiles. Who is singing this song? I am a river of hands that reach to the suffering, the suppressed in South Africa, the paralyzed in El Salvador, the starving of Ethiopia, the dying Hibakusha, a wreath of black hands, woven from blossoms shaped from whispers for justice over the grave of Vincent Chin, a sea of beating hands that persuade patriarchy's that strength is not forced and real power is not oppressing nor patronizing, but shared power among people free, working, creating, passionate, who is singing this song? I am. We survive by hearing. We speak to each other, offering choices to live, to dream, to extend our hands, to dance, to cringe, to quiver, to kiss, to not kiss. I dare you, dare you to love, to dream, to kiss. We survive by hearing. Who is singing this song? I am. Thank you. Sometimes I forget how much I love hearing you. Thank you for reminding me. Okay. Our next reader is Jenny Lim, who, if you had told me that I would end up introducing Jenny at events, I would have laughed in your face. She's a phenomenon part of a couple of different events that definitely caused me to continue writing and somebody I deeply respect. Jenny Lim. Thank you, Kim. And likewise, I deeply respect you and all that you've given our city as a poet laureate. And thank you to Lauren and Anissa and everyone who put this, the public library together. I've known Jan from the 70s and talk about a person who shows up. She always showed up no matter how busy she was at our community events through jam, Japan, art and media, Kearney street workshop when we had benefits. And she was so busy getting busier and busier with glide, but she always made time for us. Then flash forward to the future. She became an international icon busier and busier as glide became global trips to Africa, etc. And yet she still made time for us. The last time we performed together on the same stage was with Anthony Brown in the Asian American orchestra at her 70th anniversary of the dropping of the bombs and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And of course she was passionate. She was brilliant. And I noticed there are a couple of people from the old days, Kearney street workshop Doug Yamamoto, who is also a fellow poet read with Jan and then Leon son with the jam. But these are all the grassroots organizations that we grew up with and which Jan helped to nurture. So thank you, Jan. We love you. And this is breaking silence. She has a poem called breaking silence. This was inspired by Jan's poem. As she was so committed to and passionately so wanting her mother to testify in the hearings. It would ironically occurred 9 11 1981 for the reparations. Committee. So this is breaking silence. Breaking silence the way an old house creaks when it's abandoned. Breaking silence the way a snow lion vanishes without a trace whenever tracked. Breaking silence in the 10,000 mile march through the hills and valleys of stolen ground and farms with summer squash rotting on deserted vines. Breaking silence against the evacuation orders, loyalty oaths branding the dispossessed enemy alien. Jap. No, no boy persona non grata. Breaking silence to lift the stigma of incarceration from bound feet and hands. Breaking silence to reclaim our bodies, our faces, our tongues, our voices, our children, our names, our canceled dreams and blood inheritance. Breaking silence for the women who hold up half the sky for the men at war fighting for the survival of the richest. Breaking silence for the forsaken, the homeless, the broken, the abused. Breaking silence to tell the truth against colonial narratives and lies. Breaking silence with the fierce courage and the clear vision of the snow lion who protects her cops and rekindles the fire of the sacred feminine from the ashes of a world broken, a broken world of refugees to give us shelter and love. Thank you to Janice and all the wonderful poet laureates here for what you give the city and all the poetry. Thank you. As always, you are awesome. Our next poet is Lauren Ito, who is my co-host today, but also somebody I've been very high-handed with Lauren. We met at an event, and ever since then, I've been bullying her about sharing more of her poetry and getting more active and all of those things, and she's allowed me to do it, which I completely appreciate. I believe one of the events was an open mic, and I said, if you've read it in an open mic before, and she said no, and I was like, there's the microphone. Which is a bit of a liberty. Anyway, she does amazing work. The things that she's done since has been totally incredible, and I am blown away by this lady. Lauren. Oh, Kim, thank you for that introduction. I was telling, I mentioned earlier today to someone that I work for Kim, so. Thank you, Kim. And again, for making sure that this space was a reality, so thank you. People shared how they kind of came into contact with Janice's work, and I have Patty Wada to thank for that. Patty Wada, who is in attendance tonight. Thank you, Patty, for this afternoon. Suggested that I read Janice's words in a moment where things felt really shaky, and I told Janice when we started spending time together that those poems and her words made me feel seen for the first time. So thank you to Janice and to all those who have led to our paths intersecting and to folks like Kim, who have ensured that I continue to step into poetry and alongside folks like the incredible Janice. Devorah also mentioned earlier that it is, I believe something along the lines, like it is a blessing to be someone that experienced love from Janice, and I feel very seen by those words, Devorah, and I'm honored to have been someone that had the opportunity to know her and be led by her in my poetry journey. So today I'll be reading a letter to my daughter this book, Believe It, Dangerous. Oh, such a great one. Letter to my daughter. You have left home, not when expected nor desired, but most probably at the right time. I finger the hem of the short skirt you left behind, sigh, at the empty phone socket, and hear the echoes of rock music crashing off your empty walls. I wonder at the chasm between us and weep for my loss, ah, that I could mend and bridge those silences you built, like garrisons to protect the fragile blooming of yourself. So I ask, what would I give to you, my daughter? My jade ring, my pearl necklace, the blue kimono handed down by my mother, china cups brought from Japan, survivors of cane fields and concentration camps, grandmothers modeled and vented pot used to nourish generations, daughter, I want you to know the compassion of an old pot. She would feed everyone, children, dogs, chickens, sheep, no matter what, drought, poverty, bill collectors, we didn't know how she did it, out of almost nothing. Gizzards, chicken feet, fish heads, greens, from grandmother's pot came feasts. It was her daily certainty to sustain us, repeated like a ritual that we understood the reliance of one creature upon the other, each apart unto the whole, deserving the fundamental act of care. They found her in the barn, crumpled beneath a sack of mash. Past feeding time she groaned, despite the hump on her crickled back. The joints twisted with arthritis and age, she kept her hands open like spoons. What else, daughter? Memory that instills passion and connectedness. My mother, a lovely ribbon in the field of soil, her hands delicate like camellias, thought she would escape the drudgery of the farm and dreamed her dreams to become a singer. In America, land of opportunity, except for all persons of Japanese ancestry, locked behind barbed wire, she didn't sing anymore. It was like somewhere in her core, someone's spit, filthy chap, made her recoil and that part of her died. And though the hurt rippled on her tongue, she swallowed all of it, choking it back, holding it down, never to release those bitter notes. Racism and war and abandonments made her fearful of loss. She saves everything now. Stamps, aluminum foil, coupons, string. Collecting loose strands, she rolls patiently into a ball, tying end to end. I unraveled the tangled threads of my life and extricably tied to hers. For so long, I blamed her for my knots of insecurity, worthlessness, how easy to blame her, rather than look at myself. It was not my mother who tied the cord of dependence around my neck. She did not delude me into thinking I am nothing without a man. Her history is a lesson for my freedom. And yours, my daughter, what do I want for you? To know the necessity of struggle, the absence of struggle is death. Do not be lulled into passivity and indifference, self-indulgence, and isolation. We live in a society that seduces us into complacency, mindless consumerism, the anesthetics of drugs, instant gratification, easy answers, materialism, a society that threatens we should not make disturbances. Insidious racism that tells us we are conditionally acceptable, only if we fit into their mold of the model minority. This one-dimensional caricature, houseboy, oriental chink without history or ability or thought, do not accept the exoticized China doll, geisha girl, can't tell you apart, good and mad, you speak English so well, death of a rebel. Remember, daughter, that not one generation ago, we were the expendable ones, denied justice, incarcerated for the crime of ancestry. The barbed wire of those camps is still wrapped around my heart. The scars from wounds must come memory. Listen to the stories. We are the heroes, the sheroes, the pages we write, the songs we compose, the testimonies we claim. They will save our lives, make you proud. They will extend to you the hands of justice that must expand from El Salvador to Soweto, from Tiananmen Square to Azerbaijan, from a bloody Stockton schoolyard to the bloody streets of Howard Beach, from the tenements of refugees to the homeless shelters in the Tenderloin to the reservations on Pine Ridge. What do I want for you, my daughter? The courage to join these hands for your ends of string are inextricably tied. One to the other, to the suffering and the hungry, the unknown and the victorious ones. One to another, mother, grandmother, you. Their struggle has ensured our survival. Their love has birthed your possibilities. What do I want for you, daughter? To continue to tie generation to generation, these threads of memory, to bind each other in justice, to mend with love and always with your own voice to sing your song. Thank you. Thank you so much, Lauren. That was incredible. I'm told that Cecil and Tianan are here, and I'm really glad you're here. So thank you. As I move away from my list and lose track of things. Yay! I'm going to call it Michael Warnext, and what Michael doesn't know is that the main reason that I invited him to read today was because the last conversation that Janice and I had was actually in fault him directly, which he doesn't know, but now he does. So Michael's been a lot of things, but among them quite a remarkable poet, and I really appreciate that he's here. Michael Warne. Thank you so much, Kim. I'm thrilled to have this opportunity to honor Janet and Mira Katani. I want to first share a few words from her that resonate with me. I found that my wounds begin to heal when the voices of those endangered by silence are given power. The silence of hopelessness of despair buried in the depths of poverty, violence, and racism are more deadly than bullets. The gift of light and our compassion and our passion, our listening, and our works of love is the gift of life to ourselves. And that's from an interview that she did with Fatitude Literary Magazine, which I'll put in the chat. I first met Janet through the pages of an anthology we were publishing together. It's a book entitled Unsettling America with a very multicultural poetry, and her poem Jade is included in the anthology and is, you know, the first poem that I read by her. So I'm going to share Jade by Janet Mira Katani. The woman insisted, my name must be Jade. Your name, not Jade. Well, it should be. It suits you. Jewel of the Orient. I knew a young hooker called Jade. She had red dyed hair and yellow teeth. Bucked around a perpetual candy bar. They called her Jade because she was Clyde Jewel of the Orient. Her name was Semiko. Partly or Johnson or Smith. She was from Concord, boring, she said, and kept running away from home. Her father would come looking for her, beat her again, drag her home while her mother babbled and bawled in Japanese. Concord was boring. Jade kept running away. Clyde Jewel of the Orient. He took care of her well, and she couldn't wait to see him, her hunger like locusts and drought, to put the cold needle in her vein, blood blossoming in the dropper like Bougainvillea, pulling, pushing the heroine through her eyes, exploding with green lights and cold, encasing each corpuscle. Rushing through heart to spine, a freeze settling in each vertebrae, until she's as cold as stone. Metapult, excuse me. Metabolism at zero degrees, speech center numbed, and life as still as icicles, pain, boredom, loneliness, like a frosty pillow where she lays her naughty head. I wanted to tell the woman who kept insisting my name with Jade about Jade, who OD'd. Her jaundiced body found on her cold floor mattress, roaches crawling in her ears, her dead eyes glassy as jewels. Rest in peace and power, Janet. Thank you. Our next reader. Honestly, I'm just looking down this list and being amazed by the people who've done so much work with her over the years and who continue to do the work anyway. Nellie Wong is just a real treasure of the poetry scene in San Francisco for a lot of reasons, not least the work that she did with Unbounded Feet 3, but other things as well. I'm always blown away by her and she's also my neighbor. Welcome, Nellie. Thank you. Thank you, Kim. It's great to be here with all of you to celebrate Janice's life and legacy. I wanted to just share a letter, a note that Janice had written me, and then I'd like to read a poem of hers. This was March 5th, 1981. Dear Nellie, I want to thank you for sending me the paper you presented at the Right Left Conference and more expressed by gratitude for your comments and including my poem. I am very moved by your statement and your stance projected in the paper. I have also used many of those who included in the paper as examples of our Asian American voices fighting and writing, including your own powerful voice, Nellie. In fact, I mentioned individuals and the Unbounded Feet Collective, which was incorrectly printed along with a lot of other misquotes. While I was at Oberlin, Brown, Harvard and Yale a couple of weeks ago, I enclosed that article review for your information. The Oberlin review is the University newspaper. Again, Nellie, thank you for all you do, for all of us, not only on the platforms you speak from, but in your work, your poetry, your words, which give us strength and courage to struggle on with appreciation, a love, Janice, Mary Gattani. So, it's been a long time since we've known each other and probably appeared together at readings and in the movements as well. So, I too was looking for poems by her. She has so many that are moving and really, really teaches us so much. But this one moved me a lot and I will share it with you now. This is called For a Daughter Who Leaves. More than gems in my comb box shaped by the goddess of the sea, I prize you, my daughter, Lady Otomo, 8th century Japan. A woman weaves her daughter's wedding slippers that will carry her steps into a new life. The mother weaves a loan into her jewel sewing box, slips red thread around his spool. The same she used to stitch her daughter's first silk jacket embroidered with turtles that could bring luck, long life. She remembers all the steps taken by her daughter's unbound quick feet, dancing on the stones of the yard among yellow butterflies and white-bristed sparrows. And she grew legs strong, body long, mind independent. Now she captures all eyes with her hair combed smooth and her hips gently swaling like bamboo. The woman spins her thread from the spool of her heart, knotted to her daughter's departed wedding slippers. Janice's words will live on and encourage all of us. Thank you so much for that beautiful work, Nellie. And our next reader is going to be Susan Kitasawa. She lives in San Francisco where she's worked for many years as a registered nurse and mainly serving those on the margins. She enjoys creative play and continuing community advocacy and also read alongside Janice for the Fire Thieves event. So without further ado, I'll pass it to Susan Kitasawa. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you very much to you, Lauren, and to Kim for putting this together. It's very wonderful to be able to be part of this. Thank you to the San Francisco Public Library and also a special thanks to the Talking Book and Braille Center of the San Francisco Main Library. That's been a wonderful life-saving thing for me and very much an inspiration. And the reason why I'm connected with them is because I have a vision disability and so I am not able to read even very large print writing that I've written with my eyes. And so I'm going to use the synthesized text reader voice on my computer to read the poem that I wrote for Janice. So hopefully this will work. And I'm going to get rid of my video so I don't have to worry about that and can just focus on my computer. Okay. Slow, slower. I'm sorry, Susan, we lost you. Can you redo? Susan, you got muted somehow. Do over. All right. Do over. Am I unmuted now? Yes, you are. Technology is such a gift and technology is so difficult. All right, here goes the Zoe text reader voice. Hopefully loud enough and people tell me to do it slow. So this is as slow as it goes. Oh, you have time's breath. Start at the beginning. Two years ago. Okay. For some reason it does not want to start. The title of this poem is an ordinary woman and it keeps skipping over the title. So we'll see what it does this time. The two years ago, we sat side by side awaiting a reading. You aware of your husband's so in need of home comfort, not to be sitting stoically beside us in an old wheelchair. We chatted about less known worlds of life with disability, understanding wrapped herself around us, comforting us with a shared knowing of times when parts fail, when legs fail, when eyes blur, when simply being becomes work, when life is steep and the trail a bit uneven. You were a warrior woman, a wonder, a bright light. The whole city knew you, whether delighted or at odds. People noticed you, not only for your elegance and grace, you were someone special, someone not to be forgotten, yet you were someone ordinary, a regular woman who likely washed dishes, did the laundry, and those tasks taken for granted in our ordinary women's lives. You had a job, went to work, earned a living, you stood in red, bright and brave. In spite of your ordinary woman's worry for your husband's health, you regretted not being able to linger longer to listen, embracing me, you told me to keep sharing my writing. Thus, I said, yes, when asked to read for you today, if we are to believe Wikipedia, that found you've information. You were the child of California chicken farmers, born in Stockton, not Paris, not Cairo, nor Kyoto, not exotic, not a stranger, you were a regular American. Despite being ordinary Americans, you and your family spent time encircled by government barbed wire and watched towers, like so many ordinary people, you were seen as suspicious simply because others could not see. An ordinary girl living an ordinary life, you were used by a man to pleasure himself when you were not yet grown. These dreadful times, now called lived experiences, are common fare for so many of us ordinary people. You understood, you got it about ordinary people because you were deeply rooted in being ordinary, ordinary, regular, usual, commonplace, all those so underrated adjectives, all those deep unsung riches. You got it about people who were living ordinary lives. What's more, we saw that you got it, that you believed that we could make it up the steep, uneven path. We saw you knew this path because you were on it. You were on this path walking next to us. You were walking next to them. You were walking next to me. You knew there were neither people larger than life nor pathetic people, objects of pity, somehow less than you. You knew this bone deep because you were all ordinary, stuck in child of chicken farmers, born without the silver spoon, never seeking to have this. You poured light into ordinary lives so that we could see who we really are. That's it. Thank you so much, Susan. You know I love your work, and I'm really glad that you were here. Thank you. It is my enormous pleasure to introduce the current and eighth poet laureate of San Francisco, Tongo Eisen Martin. And in the great tradition of activist poets, many of whom you've heard today, Tongo is holding up the sky for us now, and everybody before dances the grass down for the people who are up to it at the moment. That's a pow wow reference. Anyway, I'm really glad you're here, Tongo. Good friend, great poet. Tongo Eisen Martin. My daughter, I want to tell you that my grandmother who lives with Tee after a day's work tell me how my eyes contain light that will illuminate possibilities. It matters not what others say about us. All that comes before us, dwells within us. All that comes here after is our legacy. From the phosphorescence of our bodies we are ignited by touch. We are rekindled by the breath of memory, the movement around us, the stirring for justice, the need for you, our children to continue. Remember the stories we write on our skin, luminous with light that shines from within, we will find one another again. And again, remember this, to love in yourself what the spirit has gifted, all that came before, all that comes here after, all of it, all of it. From a two-floor skyline in abandoned house, talk to me. It said, young man, you are heroic in ten years old. Among twenty generations of friends, your friends will free fall away. They'll free fall up. They'll free fall to walls with fifth grade speed to industrial paint behind secondhand fences. Young man use quick knife tones. Be gone in brass, be last laugh music. You're always leaving, always when change of clothes from the door, a life in escape. Two-floor skyline said, you're the guy that dies in the middle. The friend more blues than skin. The face that cheap hotels get the friendlies can place. With their 90 mile per hour right eyes among dry heat killers, once children three feet high and roaming and repeating and aiming at cotton mirrors that hang on breathing walls, you are ten years old, tagging along, yawning at welded violence, yawning at blue shop songs, you will be useful. You will be hiding alone. Flying on a nephew dragging from a $20 family in the sky that causes self just more soil around walls than just walls, except these walls suggest you make wives out of highs and currency here to airs polite to sleepy glass and boolean walls. Young man, you will come to admit that sometimes suicide is power because some people live stronger as ghosts and sometimes the afterlife empties billions of souls into objects like playground bullets and abandoned door frames, where the glass will prove it has voice too. There are 24 hours behind your back. Look over your shoulder right now. Can you hear the sound of drums punching themselves out? The sound of piano parts learned in between the sassination that tends to be bone and brass be bone enough for two souls, be invincible again. Suffer red-eyed accents, professional fingertips, get the victim six in the morning beer, the first month of probation to shout at the wall, see these words that shouldn't be home, look behind you again, be invincible again, be whenward, be a sad machete, be her son, be a thief still as back laugh too long and look away after life will empty and walk you home. You're awesome as always. I really appreciate everybody coming. I know Lauren has something to say to you, but I want to thank you personally. I feel like when we lose somebody meant so much to a city, it's very hard. It was weird for me to decide to put together a thing, not because she didn't do it, but because she didn't do it. I wanted to put together a thing, not because she didn't deserve it, because I didn't think I was the one to do it and I know that there are other things happening and we'll tell you about one of them in a second. But it's always strange. Also, it's always strange putting together any collection of people for any purpose because just like anthologies, there is never a complete anthology, none of them are ever finished because there are so many other people who could have been included. That's what I'm going to read today. This was this reading. If it wasn't enough for you, I totally encourage you to put together another one. I mean, it's probably possible to find places to do that. And I really, really appreciate that people loved her so much that they came out today. Thank you so much, Lauren. Thank you so much to everyone who joined to all the poets who read to Anissa in the San Francisco Public Library for helping us facilitate this space. And lastly, just want to remind folks that there is a memorial that's going to be hosted by Glide tomorrow in case people are looking for another space to really celebrate Janice's life. So thank you all again for coming and we'll drop that link.