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A Portable Peace Protest, From Iraq to Palestine

This is an anthology of poems that describes the 2024 Cabrillo College annual Al Mutannabi Street Starts Here, as part of the global movement that recognizes the 2007 bombing of the street of booksellers in Al Mutannabi, Iraq. Geneffa Jahan, an English teacher at Cabrillo College, has hosted this event since 2019. Years later, in 2023 invited me to read a poem I had written about the unjust death of Mahsa Amini in 2022. This year, the annual event focused on the war in Gaza, and the poems and photography of the event are captured in this chapbook. The proceeds will be donated to a non-profit organization that serves to provide health care or food for the victims who remain in Gaza. Thank you if you decide to buy the book through lulu.com or request a copy through this website. Please use the contact form to request a copy. Each book is $15.00. Shipping cost varies.

Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, My Poetry Collage for the Writers of Color 2022 Reading

The photo collage below describes the poems I read at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History with the Writers of Color. The poems can be found in my book, “Keepers of the Malicgong Rice Terraces,” which will be available through Amazon in November 2024. The redwoods are a snapshot from a hike through Pogonip that borders UC Santa Cruz. The Manong fieldworkers symbolize Femin Tobera, who was killed during a Watsonville Anti-Filipino violent riot in January, 1930. The young woman, Mahsa Jhina Amina, is a twenty-two-year-old Iranian woman who was killed in Tehran in 2023 because she retaliated against the Minority Police who harassed her for wearing her hijab loosely and her hair to falling around her face. And the last one, bottom left, is my Bontoc grandmother, Apong Cadan, holding me when I was not quite one year old. The photo was taken in 1957, in Baguio City, Philippines, in the Cordillera region of Northern Luzon, Philippines.

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