MoAD Podcasts: Recent Episodes
Museum of the African Diaspora
Live recordings of panel discussions, artists talks, and more from the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, California.
Artist Statement:
Thea Matthews (she/her) is a Black Indigenous Mexican American poet / scholar / activist who writes on the complexities of humanity, grief, and resiliency. For her, poetry serves as a means to validate Truth. The act of writing poetry a solitary act of collaboration with Spirit, Self, and fellow poets she comes across via an open mic, a literary reading, a book found in the free bin at a local book store, or on a free table, as well as those she deeply admires– June Jordan, Pat Parker, Jericho Brown, Janice Mirikitani, Cassandra Dallet, and others. Through her poetry, experience is validated, the unseen is seen, the unheard is heard. Thea converses with the world in poetry, shedding silence to vulnerable topics, such as child sexual abuse. She explores themes of self-affirmation, reclamation of power, and Love as an armor to violence. In her poetry, she divulges personal accounts of enduring, surviving, and transcending sexual violence. She also illustrates her observations and experiences of systemic oppression, as well as its impact of class, addiction, and homelessness on her communities.
Biography:
Born and raised in San Francisco, CA Thea Matthews is an emerging poet, scholar, and activist. She earned her BA in Sociology at UC Berkeley where she studied and taught June Jordan’s program Poetry for the People. A seasoned performer of spoken word, she also poems published in the Atlanta Review, Foglifter, The Rumpus, For Women Who Roar magazine, and others. She is a contributing author in anthologies Still Here San Francisco (Foglifter Press 2019) and Love WITH Accountability: Digging up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (AK Press 2019). Currently, she is working on getting her first full-length collection of poetry Unearth [The Flowers] published, and extending her chapbook Grim(e) into her second full-length.
In this weekly summer series, eight Bay Area poets share new poems created in response to the current exhibitions. They will also describe the processes they employ in writing ekphrastic work. Come and see, come and listen, come and experience the art that moves your spirit to consider power and liberation.
Tongo Eisen-Martin was born in San Francisco and earned his MA at Columbia University. He is the author of someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015), nominated for a California Book Award; and Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights, 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award, a 2018 California Book Award, was named a 2018 National California Booksellers Association Poetry Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize. Eisen-Martin is also an educator and organizer whose work centers on issues of mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people, and human rights. He has taught at detention centers around the country and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. He lives in San Francisco.
Oyinkan Braithwaite is a graduate of Kingston University in Creative Writing and Law. Following her degree, she worked as an assistant editor at Kachifo Limited, a Nigerian publishing house, and as a production manager at Ajapaworld, a children’s educational and entertainment company. She now works as a freelance writer and editor. In 2014, she was shortlisted as a top-ten spoken-word artist in the Eko Poetry Slam, and in 2016 she was a finalist for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She is the author of the celebrated novel My Sister, the Serial Killer, published by Doubleday Book. She lives in Lagos, Nigeria.
Paul Yamazaki has served as the chief book buyer at City Lights Booksellers for over 40 years. His position in the book-trade is well revered and he has served on the boards of numerous arts and literary non-profits and well as participating in national bookseller discussions affecting the trade.