The S-List: Six Readings featuring BIPOC Writers, in Conjunction with Rooted & Written

Maker, Mentor, Muse & Alta Mesa Center for the Arts Presents

The S-List: Six Readings featuring BIPOC writers
In partnership with Rooted & Written
Sunday, September 27th - 7pm-8pm PDT
Zoom

Join us for a special evening featuring six poets and writers Swetha Amit, Shirley Huey, Sabina Khan-Ibarra, Susan Kiyo Ito, Sezin Devi Koehler, and Shizue Seigel. This reading is in conjunction with Rooted & Written. 

About Our Readers

Swetha Amit holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco and is an active member of the Writers Grotto, where she chairs the Literary Salon series. She has authored a memoir and three chapbooks. Her stories have appeared in Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, JMWW, Cream City Review, McNeese Boudin, and others. Her works have been selected for Wigleaf Top 50 2026, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fiction. A Rooted and Written fellow in 2024 and a Vona Voices fellow in 2025, Swetha’s writing has received support from the Kenyon Review writer’s workshop, Tin House, Community of Writers, Vona Voices, Lit Camp, Bending Genres, and The Writer’s Grotto. She is currently working on a novel that explores how a particular sport induces self-confidence and a newfound purpose in a 40-something-year-old woman’s life.

Shirley Huey is a San Francisco Bay Area-based writer whose work explores the search for home: at kitchen tables, through efforts to find purpose, and in our relationships with each other. Her writing has been generously supported by VONA, the Writers Grotto’s Rooted & Written program, Kearny Street Workshop, Mesa Refuge, Left Margin Lit, Roots.Wounds.Words, and Quillisascut Farm. She has read her work throughout the Bay, including at Poetry in Parks at China Camp State Park, Oakland Asian Cultural Center, the Lost Church, and the Asian Art Museum. She is an omnivore, an ambivert, and a proud former theater kid.

Sabina Khan-Ibarra is a Pakistani Pashtun Muslim American writer, poet, and educator whose work explores family, memory, inheritance, and belonging. Her poetry and prose have appeared in SWWIM Every Day, The Rising Phoenix Review, Panoply, Anomaly, and other journals and anthologies, with new work forthcoming in AGNI. Her writing has received recognition from Palette Poetry, CRAFT, and the University of Wisconsin Press. She is currently working on her poetry collection, What My Mouth Inherited. Sabina teaches poetry and creative writing with The Writers Grotto, San Diego Writers, Ink, and Litquake’s Elder Project. She is a 2026 Bay Area Artist Census Fellow for San Mateo County and serves as Director of Rooted & Written through the end of 2026

Susan Kiyo Ito is the author of the memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, published by the Ohio State University Press. It was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award, shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize for International Literature, and named a best book of 2023 by the Library Journal. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in The Writer, Hyphen, Literary Mama, Catapult, The Bellevue Literary Review, Agni, Guernica, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, The Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook, and Blue Mountain Center. Her theatrical adaption of Untold, stories of reproductive stigma, was produced at Brava Theater. She is a member of the Writers Grotto in San Francisco.

Sezi Devi Koehler is a queer multiracial Sri Lankan/Lithuanian American and author of Much Ado About Keanu: A Critical Reeves Theory (April 2025, Chicago Review Press), a sociocultural deep dive into what makes Keanu Reeves so extraordinary as a performer and artist. Sezin's bylines include Entertainment Weekly, The Daily Beast, Queerty, and many more. Her poetry has appeared in Tension Literary, Verse News, Syncopation Literary Journal, and Dark Poets Club. Sezin writes from an East Oakland historic landmark that looks uncannily like the house from Practical Magic, where she can see the San Francisco Bay from her own window.

Shizue Seigel is a Japanese American writer and visual artist based in San Francisco. Her passion for civil rights arises her family’s incarceration in American concentration camps during World War II. She grew up as an Army brat in the 1950s, shuttling between segregated Baltimore, post-occupation Japan, skid-row Stockton, and strawberry sharecropping camps. In the 1960s, she dropped out of school to learn though active engagement with the Haight-Ashbury, Indian ashrams, corporate offices, public housing, and needle exchanges. Since 2015, she has supported over 400 writers and artists of color through workshops, events and anthologies organized by Write Now! SF Bay. Her nine books include five BIPOC anthologies, a poetry collection and 3 books on the Japanese American experience. She recently launched www.CivilLibertiesUnited.com, a website featuring poetry, artwork, and history about communities marginalized by injustice.

Rooted & Written is the first tuition-free program taught by and for BIPOC writers in the United States. Our mission is to provide transformative mentorship, a supportive and safe community, and access for emerging writers of color across multiple genres to develop their craft and share their powerful voices with the world and to foster a more inclusive literary landscape.

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.

Alta Mesa Center for the Arts is an interfaith arts and spirituality hub, housed and sponsored by Orinda Community Church and in partnership with Maker, Mentor Muse. Follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.