This Poetry Reading Series provides a unique opportunity to hear diverse and unusual sets of readers, pairing local Bay Area poets with visiting poets and writers. 

Rachel Richardson is the author of two books of poetry, Copperhead (2011) and Hundred-Year Wave (2016), both selections in the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University. Her poetry and prose appear in The New York Times Magazine, Lit Hub, New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, the Poetry Foundation website, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Rachel is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of Left Margin LIT, a literary arts center in Berkeley, California. She also directs poetry programming for the Bay Area Book Festival. She lives with the writer David Roderick and their two children in Berkeley.

Jaswinder Bolina is author of the full-length poetry collections The 44th of July (2019), Phantom Camera (2013), and Carrier Wave (2007), and of the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America (2014). His debut collection of essays Of Color was released by McSweeney’s in 2020. He is currently completing work on a fourth collection of poems.