"Attending Word Performances is something akin to finding yourself inside a marvelous Literary Carnival where a cavalcade of uber-talented players delight, amuse, enlighten, play, sing, dance, revel; add in the lovely intimacy of The Lost Church with its Lynchian burlesque charm to the evening’s fun and you have a perfect backdrop for the broad array of deep talent ..."
Review on LitseenWord Performances is a series of poetry, prose, and comedy where words are the lead, music is featured, and dance makes a cameo.
Our Litcrawl show featured writer and performer Mikl Em, activist poet Lorna Dee Cervantes, author Andrew O. Dugas, violinist Hannah Glass, wordsmith Todd Siegel,
and author Cybele Zufolo Siegel.
Produced and Curated by
Cybele Zufolo Siegel & Todd Siegel
One of the most anticipated literary nights of the year, San Francisco's Lit Crawl is a massive, one-night literary pub crawl throughout the city’s Mission District. Lit Crawl SF brings together 500+ authors and close to 10,000 fans for the world’s largest free pop-up literary event. Started in 2004, Lit Crawl cultivates a unique, resonant brand: smart and silly, worldly and wacky events presented in venues usual (bars, cafes, galleries, and bookstores) and unusual (police stations, tattoo parlors, barbershops, and laundromats). Get the Litcrawl map
Lorna Dee Cervantes is an award winning Chicana, Native American (Chu-mash), feminist, activist poet who is considered one of the major Chicana poets of the past 40 years. She has been described by Alurista, as “probably the best Chicana poet active today.” Lorna Dee Cervantes was an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder until 2007. She considers herself “a Chicana writer, a feminist writer, a political writer” (Cervantes). Her collections of poetry, Emplumada, From the Cable of Genocide, Drive: The First Quartet and Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems are held in high esteem and have attracted numerous nominations and awards.
Andrew O. Dugas is a Midwesterner by birth, an East Coaster by upbringing, and a West Coaster by choice. (He was once an expat in Brazil by accident, but that's another story.) His novel "Sleepwalking in Paradise" was published by Numina Press in 2014 (sleepwalkinginparadise.com) and his fiction and poetry have appeared in Bone Journal, Mayfly, Unlikely Stories, 100 Word Story, LITnIMAGE, Instant City, and many other places. In a recent fit of creative paroxysm and questionable judgment, he became "Haiku Andy" and mailed 1,001 original hand-inscribed haiku postcards to as many randomly selected recipients. Odds are that you or someone you know or someone you know's cousin got one. (haikuandy.com)
Mikl (Michael McElligott) has been active in San Francisco’s art and theater scene as a performer and instigator of unusual events for more than 20 years. From 01999 to 02003 Michael hosted and co-produced The Tentacle Sessions a monthly series spotlighting accomplished individuals in the San Francisco Bay Area scene—including writers, artists, and scientists.
He has produced and performed in numerous alternative theater venues over the years including Popcorn Anti-Theater, The EXIT, 21 Grand, Stage Werx, and the late, great Dark Room Theater. Michael has been a long-time blogger (usually under his nom de kunst mikl-em) for publications including celebrated arts magazine Hi Fructose and award-winning internet culture site Laughing Squid.
He co-produces the Conversations at The Interval speaking series, booking, overseeing production and often hosting talks.
You'll find his writing in print in the Hi Fructose Collected Edition books and Tales of The San Francisco Cacophony Society in which he recounts some of his adventures with that noted countercultural group.tifhiggins.blogspot.com
Cybele is the author of Ocean Sounds in New York a collection of poetry, essays and non-fiction
prose about dance, love, and performance and Dancer Girl: I Remember
the NYC Ballet: Poems and Prose on Dance and Performance, She holds an
MA from Columbia University, is a National Endowment for the Humanities
grant recipient, former dancer with the New York City Ballet and has
appeared in films, plays and voice overs. Cybele is the co-founder of Word Performances.
She can be found at cybelezufolo.comhttp://cybelezufolo.com
Classically trained in piano and violin, Hannah Glass has been sharing her multi-instrumental and vocal talents in the Bay for 6 years now. She has performed at venues such as the Sydney Opera House, Hollywood Bowl, Disneyland's 75th Anniversary, UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall at Ted Talks, The Great American Music Hall, and Chinatown's historic Great Star Theater. At UC Berkeley she sang, arranged and directed for DeCadence a cappella, and she studied Baroque violin and viola under the esteemed organist Davitt Moroney and violinist Carla Moore. On occasion she plays solo gypsy-jazz and tango at Kat Robichaud's Misfit Cabaret. She also records and performs indie rock with many Bay Area bands including Your Fearless Leader, Manos Lindas, and Christopher Youmans & the Sound Agency. Hannah looks forward to using her new flexibility as a Rap Analyst at Pandora Radio to go on tour!
crafts and performs idea satire poetry, and was called "the e e cummings of San Francisco tech culture" by Joel Landmine at Identity Crisis III.
He
co-produces the Word Performances series with his infinitely lovely
wife Cybele. In perpendicular, Todd designs and prototypes user
experiences and serves as a wordsmith for startups, and was interviewed in The New Yorker about the future
present of work.
"There's no shortage of writers in San Francisco, nor of places where we can read. But this one stands out. Word Performances has elements of the old-fashioned soiree but also something unexpected and curious. The writers they invite are both well-known and newcomers, and on any given night there might be a singer or a dancer or a stand-up comic. It's a delightful event - one with a love of performance and a deep commitment to words. If you believe the digital age has killed literature, you'll need to think again."