Books on the Garden: In Our Nature: Queer Work in the Garden

Join us on Saturday, June 25 at 1pm for a pre-Pride reading celebrating the rich and beautiful intersection of nature and queer identity.

Featuring work by: Claire Calderón, Amanda Hawkins, Trey Keeve III, Brandon Logans, Emily Pinkerton, and Shelley Wong.

Date: Saturday, June 25

Time: 1-2:30 pm

Location: Garden of Fragrance

This is a free event (minus admission to the Garden for non-SF residents), but please RSVP.

Books by featured authors will be available for purchase.

Please bring blankets or chairs for sitting on the grass. Please be mindful of high chairs blocking others' view.

About the Writers

A self-described writer, reader, and lemon squeezer, Claire Calderón is a Queer Chilean-American with a proclivity for obsession. She has been awarded fellowships from Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, and elsewhere, and has an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. She is currently at work on a speculative biography about her bisabuela titled Tomato Skin.

Amanda Hawkins is a Tin House and Bread Loaf Scholar, three time Pushcart nominee, and recipient of the Editor’s Prize for Poetry at The Florida Review. Their work has been published in Orion, The Orison Anthology, Boston Review, The Cincinnati Review, Massachusetts Review, Terrain, and Tin House. They hold an MA in theological studies and are an MFA candidate at UC Davis.

Trey (also known as Vernon Keeve III) is a Virginia born, queer writer. They currently live and teach in Oakland. They hold a MFA from CCA, and a MA in Teaching Literature from Bard College. Trey's full-length collection of poetry, Southern Migrant Mixtape, was published by Nomadic Press in 2018 and is the recipient of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Trey continues to write poetry while working on their first novel, and they will be attending Columbia University in the fall to pursue a doctorate in English Education.

Brandon Logans is a poet from Oakland, California with an M.F.A in Poetry from Mills College. His work has been published in the Patrice Lumumba Anthology, Foglifter, and Variety Pack's Special Issue Black Voices of Pride. His forthcoming debut collection Phosphene, will be out sometime in 2023 through Nomadic Press. He might describe himself as a rectangular sheet of honey 30” x 62”, 6” above any surface.

Emily is the author of three chapbooks: Natural Disasters (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2016), Bloom (Alley Cat Press, 2018) and Adaptations (Nomadic Press, 2018). She was a 2020 Fellow at The Writers Grotto, and a 2017-2018 Writer in Residence at Alley Cat Books in San Francisco.

More of Emily's publications can be found at thisisemilypinkerton.tumblr.com, on twitter (@neongolden), or on instagram (@thisisemilypinkerton).

Shelley Wong is the author of AS SHE APPEARS (YesYes Books, May 2022), winner of the 2019 Pamet River Prize, and the chapbook RARE BIRDS (Diode Editions, 2017). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2021, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and Vermont Studio Center. Currently, she is an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts and lives in San Francisco.