Around the Community: Poetry and Bringing Our Youth Back to the Land

Poets and activists Kim Shuck, Loa Niumeitolu, and Lehua M. Taitano talk about the role of poetry in bringing youth back to the land.

Details:
Thursday, August 22nd, 2024
5:30-7:30pm

Online Event

Lehua Taitano is a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam). She is the author of Inside Me an Island (WordTech Editions, 2018) and A Bell Made of Stones (TinFish Press, 2013). Taitano is the program and community manager at Kearny Street Workshop, and she lives on unceded Ohlone territory (San Francisco).

Loa Niumeitolu is a Tongan poet, community organizer and farmer. Her work appears in Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English; Homelands: Women’s Journeys across Race, Place, and Time; Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought; Muliwai: Hawai’i Review; and was featured on BBC Radio Scotland.  As an educator and organizer, she has worked with(in) Mataliki: Tongan Writers Group in Tonga; Ex-Prisoners and Prisoners Organizing for Community Advancement in Worcester, Massashusetts; Pacific Islander women and men prisoners in Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla and California State Prison, Solano; and co-founded the Two Spirit Takataapui LGBTQ indigenous support groups: One Love Oceania, Oyate Tupu‘anga, and Spirit Root Medicine People.

Kim Shuck engages in many things poetic. She organizes at least three poetry readings a month, has been published in many places, got some degrees (less poetic),  says things in public, and edits stuff, and has been awarded various certificates, fellowships, things that stand on shelves and one thing that should really be a cheeseboard rather than a wall adornment. Her latest books are Pick a Garnet to Sleep In and Deer/A-wi  with Denise Low.