This night of poetry readings features our very own Ruby poets: Mia Malhotra, Jennifer S. Cheng, Heidi Van Horn, and Lisa Marie Schnaubelt. Poets and nonpoets all invited! You’ll leave with a one-of-a-kind poetry starter kit created by our four readers to inspire your own writing.
About our poets
Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Isako Isako (Alice James Books, forthcoming 2018), winner of the 2017 Alice James Award. She received her MFA from the University of Washington and is a Kundiman and VONA/Voices Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Greensboro Review, Drunken Boat, Best New Poets, and elsewhere.She lives in San Mateo with her husband and two daughters.
Jennifer S. Cheng writes poetry and lyric essays. She is the author of MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems (2018), a hybrid book of the feminine monstrous, selected by Bhanu Kapil as winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize; HOUSE A (2016), selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize; and Invocation: An Essay (2010), an image-text chapbook published by New Michigan Press. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Hong Kong and received fellowships and awards from Brown University, the University of Iowa, San Francisco State University, Kundiman, Bread Loaf, and the Academy of American Poets. www.jenniferscheng.com
Heidi Van Horn is a writer who takes lots of photographs. She is co-author, with David Makaaha Kwon, of House of David, a poetic assemblage exploring the personal and political geography of mass incarceration. Currently, she is working on a book-length sequence of text + image diptychs mapping intimate distance, and guest-editing OXALIS Volume 2 for Drop Leaf Press. Heidi received her BA in Social Welfare from UC Berkeley and her MFA in Poetry from San Francisco State University. She has worked as the assistant director of the UC Berkeley Public Service Center, co-clerked the diversity committee at the San Francisco Friends School, and serves as a youth justice mentor for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. She lives in San Francisco with her three children. www.hvanhorn.com
Lisa Marie Schnaubelt is a newly self-employed writer, former teacher, and a bartender at heart. She received her MA in Poetry from San Francisco State University and likes to think and work at night. She hosts the Ruby’s monthly Night Owl Nights.