Maker, Mentor, Muse & Alta Mesa Center for the Arts Presents:
Poetry in Urgent Times taught by T.S. Leonard
Sunday, April 14th - 3:30p-5p PST
Zoom

Unprecedented is a word people use often now to describe a litany of disasters, from floods to plagues. During the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, we all experienced the same slow-moving emergency, and every day was as ‘unprecedented’ as the last. Of course for many communities on the margins of society, the challenges presented by this novel virus were actually quite precedented—and often, documented by their poets. From the darkest hours of the HIV/AIDS epidemic to the early days of the Black Lives Matter movement, poets writing responsively and urgently have played an essential role in their communities pushing forward through catastrophe. Poetry, like catastrophe, has a way of bending time—on the page, past and possibilities mingle; a better future can be summoned. How do we write responsibly from a place of urgency? To whom are we speaking in our work, and what do we hope to offer them in condolence, or celebration? In what ways can we create spaces of peace or possibility on the page?

T.S. Leonard is the author of God Save the Queens! (Irrelevant Press, 2022) and poems published or forthcoming in Post Road, Fourteen Poems, Foglifter, Frontera, & Change, and The San Franciscan. Leonard’s work explores queerness, loss, and community at the intersection of disco music and time travel. Leonard was a finalist for the 2022 Jane Underwood Poetry Prize and a poetry finalist at the 18th Annual Saints + Sinners LGBTQ Literary Festival. Leonard holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco. Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, he lives and teaches in San Francisco.

Maker, Mentor, Muse is a teaching platform founded in 2022 by Mary Volmer, Maw Shein Win, and Dawn Angelicca Barcelona. Hailing from three distinct backgrounds, generations, and spiritual traditions we believe community is essential to building a satisfying and sustainable literary life and that true success requires balancing all three artistic roles: maker, mentor, muse. In collaboration with Alta Mesa Center for the Arts, sponsored by Orinda Community Church, we are building a place where artists embrace practices that honor process, spiritual growth, connection, and ongoing community with other writers.