New Yipes: 1/21: Melissa Benham | Sean Labrador | films by Glenn Wait

Sunday, January 21 at
21 GRAND | 416 25th St
corner B'way | Oakland
6 blocks north of 19th St BART
7 pm | $4 | or whatever

Melissa Benham, a native Jersey girl, now happily resides near Children's Fairyland with her giant panda, Brent Cunningham. She is the author of codeswitching (Subday Press), and the chapbooks repronounceable and surrealistic object vs. narrated dream. For the last two years, she's been the curator & host of the Artifact Reading Series in SF with Chana Morgenstern. Currently, Melissa is single-handedly building a small human mechanism who hopefully will share her passion for unicorns and scratch 'n' sniff stickers.

The poet formerly known as Sean Manzano Labrador--a week after graduating from Mills he will be marrying the lovely Jennifer Dearinger, and both will share the last name Manzano--is a journeyman Bay Area student/poet doing time at UCB, UCSC, SFSU, and Mills. He wants to add other institutions to his nomadism. He believes in localizing his terminologies and defining his geographies within this narrow corridor. Lately he teaches the Sestina, the Pantoum, the Ghazzal, as well as Queer, Feminist, and Postcolonial theory and Critical Pedagogy in UC Berkeley's Upward Bound High School outreach Program. The last two collaborative sestinas included one twinning Donna Haraway ("A Cyborg Manifesto") and Huey Newton (founder of the Black Panther Party), and the other sestina married Horatio Alger and Tupac.