Join us for the Writers Grotto's Literary Salon.
Readers:
Lisa Rosenberg
Joanne Furio
Jane Mcdermott
Christopher D. Cook
Emcee:
Susan Kiyo Ito
Bios:
Shizue Seigel is a Japanese American writer and artist whose work was published most recently by Panorama, Tender Hearts Club, Journal X, and Porter Gulch Review. Her nine books include a poetry collection, three books on the Japanese American experience, and five anthologies of writers and artists of color, As director of Write Now! SF Bay, her work has been recognized with a KPIX Jefferson Award, and supported by the San Francisco Arts commission, California Arts Council and others.
Lisa Rosenberg is a poet and essayist formed by physics, engineering, arts, and somatic practices. The recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, MOSAIC America Fellowship, and Leonardo@Djerassi Residency, she served as the second Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, California, and worked as an engineer in the US space program. Her prose spans literary craft, satire, science, and memoir. Her poetry centers interconnectedness across nature, culture, and perceived extremes: from the fantastic to the mundane, the subatomic to the celestial. Through workshops, talks, and essays, she addresses process and systems skills essential to integrative thinking. Her collections Weeds and Stars (2026) and A Different Physics (2018) reflect decades of polydisciplinary inquiry. Based in the Bay Area, she lives part-time in Ilia, Greece.
Joanne Furio is a writer whose personal essays, flash, prose poems and author interviews have appeared in Believer, Catapult, Juked, Craft Literary, Dorothy Parker's Ashes, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters and other publications. She is also an award-winning journalist who has written regularly for The New York Times, The Village Voice, Ms., Dwell and San Francisco, where she was a contributor for a decade. She now covers books at Berkeleyside and teaches creative writing through the Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute.
Jane McDermott Boston native Jane McDermott has lived in the San Francisco Bay area since 1979. BFA, filmmaking, San Francisco Art Institute, 1982. MFA, creative writing, San Francisco State University, 2014. Her book Look Busy: One hundred 100-word stories by and for the easily distracted won the Michael Rubin Book Award. Published by Fourteen Hills Press, 2014. Jacob M Apel praised Look Busy as: “sharp, funny, and poignant. Most important, the writing rings with honesty and vulnerability…amusing and clever on the first reading, charming and poignant on the second reading, and thoroughly captivating on the third reading and beyond.” Her short fiction has appeared in the journals Red Light Lit; Reunion: The Dallas Review; Writing Without Walls; Transfer; The Rambler; and 100 Word Story and in the anthologies How Running Changed My Life and Knit Lit the Third: We Spin More Yarns. Member, San Francisco Writers Grotto. She lives in Oakland, California.
Christopher D. Cook is an author and award-winning journalist and a member of the Writers Grotto for more than 20 years. He has written for Harper's, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, The Guardian, Mother Jones, The Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, The New Republic, and elsewhere. He has worked as a reporter for The Oakland Tribune and United Press International, and city editor for The San Francisco Bay Guardian. His first book, Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis, was widely acclaimed and went paperback. Christopher also writes poetry and creative nonfiction and sings with The Conspiracy of Beards choir. Check out his work at www.christopherdcook.com
Emcee :
Susan Kiyo Ito is the author of the memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, published by the Ohio State University Press, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the William Saroyan International Prize. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Hyphen, Agni, and Guernica. She was awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, The Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook and Blue Mountain Center.
Food & drink provided.