LITQUAKE OUT LOUD
OCTOBER 19 & 20
YERBA BUENA GARDENS
Launched in 2020, Litquake Festival's curatorial program highlights the Bay Area’s BIPOC & LGBTQ+ writers and thought leaders. Out Loud puts Litquake’s production resources into the hands of guest curators who in turn produce a vibrant, dynamic series of festival events.
2024 Out Loud Schedule
2024 Curators
Giovanna, this year's Out Loud Program Manager, is a Pushcart Prize–nominated poet and visual artist. She has published two full-length poetry collections, a limited art edition, and two chapbooks. She earned her MFA at NYU, and her work has been supported by UC Berkeley, KQED, and the SFMOMA archive. She hosts The Living Room Series & Salon and performs at various arts & culture events. She lives in Oakland with her partner and their lion head bunny Maggie.
Noor Khashe Brody has always lived in the California East Bay. They are a graduate of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. Alongside two friends, they co-founded Tritone, a monthly reading series in Oakland. Send noor fanmail and find their published poems and crosswords at noooo.org.
Rhea Joseph
Rhea Joseph is a poet, curator, and event producer who comes from a family of artists and entrepreneurs. She lives in San Francisco, but writes from a global perspective, intertwining her experience of growing up in India and blooming in Boston. Rhea finds power through community and can be found exploring the boundaries of art with experimental performances and unique collaborations. She is the co-creator of the monthly Poolside Poets series at the Phoenix Hotel and helps lead Decentered Arts, a nonprofit dedicated to art of all mediums. She is currently working on her first book of poems.
Darius Simpson is a New Afrikan writer, educator, performer, and skilled living room dancer from Akron, Ohio. Much like the means of production, he believes poetry must be used for the positive social, political, and economic development of the majority of society. He aims to inspire those chills that make you frown and slightly twist up ya face in approval. His book, Never Catch Me, is out now and available at buttonpoetry.com. Darius believes in the dissolution of empire and the total liberation of Africans and all oppressed people by any means available. Free All Political Prisoners. Free The People. Free The Land.
Lourdes Figueroa is a queer chicanx oral poet & an award winning poetry filmmaker whose work is a dialogue of her lived experience when her family worked in el azadón—tilling the soil under the blistering sun. She is the author of the chapbooks yolotl, Ruidos =Learn Speak, and Vuelta. Forthcoming later this year in Mexico is her long verse poem I will kiss your mouth b/w the overgrown Milpa. Discover her latest poems in the Mexican Journal Tierra Adentro & latest poetry film Las Marimacha Fragments made in collaboration with filmmaker Peggy Peralta within 3rd Thing's Press A Good Symptom: A Serial Anthology of Time Based Disturbances. Lourdes celebrates your pocha marimachita tongue. A native of limbo nation, she continues to believe in your lung & your throat.
Mimi Tempestt (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and daughter of California. She has a MA in Literature from Mills College, and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Creative/Critical PhD in Literature at UC Santa Cruz. Her first book, the monumental misrememberings, was published with Co-Conspirator Press//The Feminist Center for Creative Work (2020). She was selected for participation in the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices & writers in 2021. Her second book, The Delicacy of Embracing Spirals, was published with City Lights (2023). Her works can be found in Foglifter, Interim Poetics, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Studio Museum in Harlem.
RawDance
Now in its 20th year, RAWdance is an award-winning contemporary dance company known for transforming theaters and public spaces through a mix of performance, curation, collaboration, and film. The company’s charged and nuanced works have been presented by the Joyce Theater, Jacob’s Pillow, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Dance St. Louis, ODC Theater, the Singapore Fringe, Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, ‘62 Center for Theatre and Dance, and more throughout the U.S. and in Asia. RAWdance has presented works by more than 150 Bay Area artists through its CONCEPT series salon since 2007, and over 40 additional site-specific works through its curation of YBG ChoreoFest from 2017 to 2022. In 2019 the company expanded to two coasts, staying rooted in San Francisco while expanding to New York’s Hudson Valley. More about the company and series at rawdance.org.
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