Join us on March 21st at 7pm at the Foundation Headquarters for a special World Poetry Day event. We will enjoy a reading by Bay area poets Kimi Sugioka and Dean Rader and celebrate our Artist Grant Award program. We will toast to poetry and its impact on art and life.
The Evening:
6:00 pm: Join us for mingling and champagne
7:00 pm: Hear from Philip Lawson, Founder and Madeline Naber, Grant Recipient 2025
Reading by Kimi Sugioka
Reading by Dean Rader
to RSVP contact Caroline Haller: weaponsoflightfoundation@gmail.com
About the Poets:
Kimi Sugioka, a Japanese Scots-Irish-American poet, songwriter and educator, navigates the many injustices she encounters through poetry and song. She uses dangerous language in a dangerous time. She was inspired and mentored by poets Anne Waldman, Diane diPrima, and Allen Ginsberg at the Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She has published two books of poetry; the newest of which is Wile & Wing on Manic D Press. She has been published in numerous anthologies and is the poet laureate of Alameda, California. As an active board member for literary arts organizations, she curates and hosts readings in Alameda and San Francisco. She believes that creating community through art is a revolutionary act.
Dean Rader is a San Francisco-based poet, essayist, translator and critic. He has authored or co- authored 14 books. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. His 2014 collection Landscape Portrait Figure Form was named by The Barnes & Noble Review as a Best Poetry Book. Other titles include the poetry collection Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry and the anthologies Native Voices: Contemporary Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations and Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. Rader writes and reviews regularly for Artforum, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Huffington Post, BOMB, Ploughshares, Hyperallergic, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, where he co-authors a poetry column with Victoria Chang. In 2020, he was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Balakian Award. His most recent book, Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, was named by Bookriot as one of ten “mesmerizing” books of modern poetry. Rader’s writing has been supported by fellowships from Princeton University, Harvard University, the MacDowell Foundation, Art Omi, The Headlands Center for the Arts. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco, the creator of the popular video series Poems That Changed Me, and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in poetry.