PAST GROUPS
FALL/WINTER 2025/2026
Chinese Century: Between
Sino-Optimism, Techno-Orientalism, & Futility
facilitated by
Tiny Lei
“Everyone get more Chinese now,” or so we say. This reading group will critique—or celebrate?—the topic of the so-called Chinese Century by engaging with related concepts such as sinofuturism/optimism and techno-orientalism. In this landscape, what does Chinese-ness entail?
tiny lei is an artist, ethnic studies scholar, and writer currently residing in oakland, california. her work focuses primarily on the topic of sino diaspora and movement — physical or figurative.
Cyberfeminist Counternarratives: The Internet Beyond ‘The Big Daddy Mainframe’
facilitated by
Kelly Neuner
In this group, we’ll explore feminist approaches to the Internet and techno-social spaces and systems through Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index, a catalog of more than 700 entries spanning academic articles to net art. We’ll pair readings with other digital media cataloged in the Index across thematic areas like technodiversity, the sexual history of the Internet, and sonic cyberfeminism – informed by the group’s specific interests – and attend Mindy Seu’s next performance lecture in November. Through discussion and optional written and/or creative reflections, we’ll expand our understanding of the histories, presents, and possible futures of our cyberspaces.
Kelly Neuner (they/them) is a designer, researcher, and artist who likes to learn about the past and present and dream about the future. They are interested in collective imagination and exploring the relationships between society, culture, and technology. They are a member of Design Science Studio, a cultural incubator focused on creating equitable and regenerative futures, where they work on participatory art projects, workshops, and worldbuilding.
Diary Study: From Day Planner to Pocket Camera
facilitated by
Danielle Shi
Where do we begin with keeping a regular record of events, written on the daily? How do we architect a place for the passage of time to find a home, to allow our vagueness and fuzziness to take form? We’ll open up diaries by Sei Shonagon, Anaïs Nin, Sarah Manguso, Roland Barthes, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka for our own perusal, exploring concepts like dailiness, creativity, and grief and the specter of war, as well as the aesthetic possibilities of the diary form, its shapeliness.
Danielle Shi (she/her) is a Chinese-born writer and photographer based in Berkeley, Calif., working on a novel manuscript, The Shelter. She blogs at danielleshi.com and can be found in-residence at Kala Art Institute this cold season, learning some photography chops. She runs the chapbook press Doll Hair with her partner Tim. Do They Owe Us a Future? (Of Course They Fucking Do!)
facilitated by
Brenna Wood Fitzpatrick
Everyone’s obsessed with the end of the world: the rich are busy building bunkers, robots, and spaceships, asking daring questions like, “How best do I control the help during an apocalypse? Perhaps with a shock collar?”; the zealots see a genocide and rejoice that perhaps it is a stepping stone to their glorious Rapture and ascension; the Silicon Valley geeks are grovelling to become the favorite pet of their prophesized AI overlords; meanwhile, even the fascists seem to have given up on trying to sell us on their Glorious Future™, since who believes in a future anymore, anyways? (Well, I do.) We’ll explore these different popular ideas and fantasies about the “end of the world,” but also practice imagining what the future could look like after we have all done absolutely everything in our power to fight facism, climate change and oppression.
Brenna is an Oakland-based tenant attorney. She grew up in Silicon Valley before moving to the East Bay to study environmental sociology and environmental philosophy. She’s been involved in anti-displacement advocacy ever since, and has no plans to move to Mars.
Hospicing Modernity
facilitated by
Avery Huetter & Michelle Ngo
Welcome to our hospicing modernity reading group! If you’re someone that’s critical of colonialism and interested in what it means to transform society from the roots, we’d love to share the book Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira with you.
Michelle Ngô (she/they) is an emerging Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioner rooted in Oakland, CA, where they are growing, healing, and co-creating alongside a vibrant and supportive community. Their practice is deeply informed by an openness to multiple forms of art, expression, and healing. It spans ancestral traditions, experimental poetics, ritual, and everyday acts of care
Avery is a massage therapist and journalism fellow. She grew up in Oakland, getting an associates from Laney before heading to New Orleans for a Bachelors in Sociology. For fun she enjoys reading, dancing, and taking way too many art classes! Reading the Freakiest Novel of All Time
facilitated by
Finnegan Clegg
Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers (originally written in a Parisian prison on the backs of paper bags) was recieved upon publication as “homosexual, criminal, perverse, religious, sacrilegious, schizophrenic, honest, appalling, incredible.” This reading group is for anyone interested in reading one of the most bizarre and imaginative books ever written, and digging into a discussion on beauty, depravity, and sexuality.
Finn Clegg is a lover of the strange and beautiful. He is currently living in Oakland and spends most of his time reading and playing music. He also attends Laney College. nurturing liminality at the edges of ourselves and the world (ONLINE)
facilitated by
Aja Lenae (they/them)
honoring historical, conceptual, artistic, and spiritual practices of liminality, we will read and discuss Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ M Archive: After the End of the World (a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm). as we are tasked with navigating the destabilizing crossroads of so many personal, relational, communal, and global endings, how can we nurture our comfortability with the grey, the in-between, the mysterious and obscured in service to the new liberatory worlds we are building and dreaming of? this group is open to all desiring to learn from lineages of Queer Black feminist co-learning in right relationship.
aja lenae (they/them) (pronounced like “asia”) is a multi-devotional creator, awe connoisseur, teacher, lifelong student, community weaver and youth collaborator rooted and raised in the bay area, california. they are interested in multi-artform storytelling as an act of bridging time and sunning our hard things softened. their offerings are soiled in their prayers for liberation and generational healing.
[Cancelled] On the Haitian Revolution, Humanism, & Black Radical Critique
facilitated by
Vika
The ongoing Haitian revolutionary project is an imperative to create. Black radical intellectuals and artists have long turned to the Haitian Revolution—its history, figures, and symbols—in their theorizations of a global revolutionary project. This reading group explores the Haitian Revolution and its particular understanding of “humanism,” with an eye toward the ways this understanding has been taken up in Black radical critique, as well as its significance for anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggle in the present.
Vika (she/they) is a multimedia artist, scholar, and musician. She is currently a Doctoral Candidate in comparative literature (French, English, and Spanish). Her dissertation intervenes in contemporary post-colonial readings of the Haitian Revolution and Black radical tragedy that render its history, figures, and politics in terms of foreclosure as tragic.
Staging the Revolution: Marxist, Anticolonial, and Workers Theater
facilitated by
Muffy Koster
Whether as a forum for representing struggles on the factory floor, a podium for speaking against colonial domination, or a framework for working out theoretical concepts of social change, the play has operated as a container for expressions of the political will of the people for over a century. This series will feature scripts and treatises on theatricality from the last one hundred years that configure theater as a realm of praxis where the proletariat, the colonized, and their advocates can rehearse for the revolution.
Muffy Koster is a community archivist, movement artist, and writer living in San Francisco. She is also a Performance Studies PhD student at UC Berkeley, where she is studying the intersections of performance and the workplace. We Who Have Never Known Men
facilitated by
Kelly Donohue
I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman is a gorgeous and freaky novel about a young woman coming of age on an alien(??) planet and trying to make meaning of it all. Originally written in 1995, it’s been having a MAJOR resurgence since being re-released in 2022. But what is it about the idea of being raised in captivity with 39 other women in an underground prison that the collective is finding so resonant? In this group we’ll try to figure it out.
Kelly Donohue is a poet/researcher/astrologer/teacher who spends a lot of time thinking about systems and parties.
A Streetcar to Subduction
facilitated by
Jack Lembke
Especially in The Bay, the very earth beneath our feet presents us with the ultimate opportunity to explore the felt interplay of time and space. Awe is a step away! Curious adventurers like you and I will converge for conversations and field trips across The Bay. Opholite of the Contra Costa Hills, fortified cliffs of the Marin Headlands, and other wonders provide the literal landscape of our history. From page to pavement, let’s step outside and play in the reverberations of deep time together!
Jackson Lembke
Born Jackson Lembke
Sept. 19 1996
6'2
Blood Type A-
Art Monsters: On Art-Making
& Parenting
facilitated by
Margaret McCarthy
How do art-making and parenthood inspire, challenge, and oppose each other? For decades, parenthood, especially the role of the mother and/or primary caretaker, has been popularly understood as antithetical to art-making. We call bullsh*t. Let’s read extracts from some of the very recent and exciting books exploring the work and lives of artist parents current and historical, the obstacles they/we face, and how these dual, vital, roles illuminate each other.
Margaret McCarthy (she/her) is a writer, performer, nonprofit executive, and proud mother of her favorite three-year-old. She has performed her work at SOMArts, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Artist Television Access, and for nine years as an ensemble member of the San Francisco Neo-Futurists, where she also served as Co-Artistic Director. She is on the board of the Center for Artistic Activism. Bodies, Beauty & Ghosts: Memoirs as acts of emancipation
facilitated by
Elizabeth Barelli
This reading group explores how women reclaim identity and power through writing, memory, and creative expression. Across memoir, essay, criticism, and art, these works examine the act of looking back—whether into personal pasts, inherited traumas, or cultural narratives—not as nostalgia, but as a radical form of freedom. Together, they show how rewriting stories and re-seeing history can transform both self and society, giving women agency to author their lives beyond silence, constraint, and erasure.
Elizabeth is a visual artist and community organizer.he way humans relate to art, the blurry lines between the natural and the human-made, and the nature of the creative process. She draws references from philosophy, feminist theory, mythology and literature to illustrate personal narratives.
She created MAD, a support community and book club for Mothers in Art and Design in the Bay Area reclaiming their creative practice, with a growing Mother's Library; and she is currently working on participative art projects around the concept of Care.
Caregiving as Radical Play
facilitated by
Vincente Perez, PhD &
Tala aka Mecca Monarch
Despair and surrender are impossible choices when you are caregiving. Even when it feels like the end of the world, bellies must be filled, minds must be activated, and lessons must be passed on. We will read and experiment with how to do communal caregiving in the midst of social upheaval in an educational, kid friendly, accessible, covid conscious setting that returns us back to experimentation and play.
Dr. Vincente Perez (He/They) is a poet and scholar working at the intersection of poetry, Hip-Hop, and critical theory. He believes poetry molds the mind otherwise. His poems have appeared in his chapbook Other Stories to Tell Ourselves as well as Huizache, Obsidian, Electric Literature, and more.
Tala Khanmalek | mecca monarch (all pronouns) is a queer, disabled, Iranian writer, editor, scholar and activist living in South Berkeley with their toddler.
In Care and Defiance
facilitated by
Rachel Sure
The work and art of caring for each other and the earthly plane twists into defiance when confronting the enclosure of care work and the commons—criminalizing our solidarity to each other and the earth’s survival. We will read texts exemplifying radical acts of caring solidarity, as well as exploring the development and hegemony of modern concepts of ‘health/care”. Discussions will elicit inquiry and action towards deep care as revolutionary praxis.
Rachel Sure (they/she) is an anarchist, harm reductionist, and defiant careworker inside and outside the medical industrial complex. They coordinate gathering spaces of solidarity and discussion amongst affinity groups in the far/hard/post-left persuasion.
Investigating the Sex Pest
facilitated by
Beatrice Kilat
From Pepe le Pew to the Shitty Media Men List, come explore the etiology and persistence of the sex pest throughout popular culture and in particular in radical, anarchic and leftist spaces. We will watch contemporary programs, read classic texts, current articles and miscellaneous tweets as we consider and confront the sex pest as a source of interpersonal and community conflict.
Beatrice Kilat is a writer and critic in Berkeley.
Seeking Change: An Amateur Study of the I Ching through Collective Scholarship
facilitated by
Kaeiolu
From emptiness and humility (read: yin), we will begin to study the I Ching, a sacred Book of Changes that is the foundation for an enormous breadth of Asian cultural cosmology and history. The interpretation we will focus on is by Benebell Wen, a Taiwanese American Taoist and occultist. With study, divination practice, and collective intention-setting, we may observe the changes to find clarity and orient ourselves to the values we hope to grow.
Kaeiolu
The Stakes of Magic: Examining Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch
facilitated by
Jenny
Step one in becoming a witch: Learn from the witches that came before. In this course we’ll read Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, which examines the subjugation and destruction of women via witch hunting in the transition to capitalism. Federici illuminates how the enclosure of reproductive labor, destruction of women’s social relationships, and utter extermination of magical belief form the invisible underbelly of the capitalist monster. We’ll discuss how witchcraft and witch hunting shape/challenge/queer our relationships with feminism, spirituality, and community care in the belly of the beast. This class is for anyone interested not only in understanding magic and witchcraft as historical artifact, but as the yet-alive vessels through which we may build toward re-enchanted and decolonial futures.
jenny (they/them) is a human on earth (oakland) trying to learn things and build things. they like reading and climbing and looking for crabs by the bay.
Third World Marxism
facilitated by
Niki Franco
Colonized people across the global south (Third World) adapted Marxist theory and praxis into their own respective contexts and sprouted revolution across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, challenging the idea of Western supremacy and hegemony.
As the US enters an increasingly fascistic political juncture, this reading group is an invitation to sit with the texts and traditions of Black and brown revolutionaries. We will explore how they adapted revolutionary praxis to their own cultural and material contexts. Our goal is not to idolize or simply historicize, but to actively engage with their lessons to inform our own visions, strategies, and actions for building a liberated future from Oakland to the rest of the world.
Niki Franco is a queer Black Caribbean community organizer, writer, and facilitator of spaces for collective study. Her work experiments with truth telling, radical history, and revolutionary imagination.
Niki is also the host of the podcast Getting to the Root of It with Venus Roots and is currently the Co-Director of Dissenters, a national anti-imperialist youth organization.
Her forthcoming debut book, unveiling the CIA's entanglements between Miami, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, is set to publish in 2026 by 1804 Books.
Traumatized and Psychologized: Examining Trauma Culture
facilitated by
Kassandra Mayhew, Ricky Mack
Are we all traumatized? What is trauma and what is not? What role does class, media, and history play in how we define trauma? This reading group will attempt to examine the definitions of trauma and commodification of trauma and the concept of healing through books, articles, and other media that address “trauma culture.” Mental health providers and consumers of therapy are all encouraged to join!
Kassandra is a psychotherapist in training and former communications strategist from Oakland with a background in media studies and literature. She sometimes organizes and sometimes lays in the sun.
Ricky Mack is a transgender relational psychotherapist in Oakland working in community based mental health. His therapeutic work focuses on navigating how to integrate complex trauma and find fulfillment through post traumatic growth.
Tuning in to Proust
(and hopefully, ourselves)
facilitated by
Kelly Egan
Let’s oppose the pace of everything else and gather in the dark heart of January to slowly read Proust aloud together. Like, the first 50 pages or so of Swann’s Way. I imagine this as a brainwave-changing experience, as well as a sort of subliminal and osmotic master class in writing or thinking about the details of our own interiority. Hot drinks and sweets, obviously.
Kelly Egan is a poet, amateur diviner, and student of the occult arts. She has an MFA in poetry from Saint Mary’s College of CA and has authored two poetry chapbooks—Millennial, from White Stag, and A Series of Septembers, from Dancing Girl Press. She studies astrology, tarot, dreamwork, and the paranormal in official and unofficial settings.
Working Class Lesbians
facilitated by
Ach Kab, Em Tillotson
This is a space for working class lesbians to gather and connect about our desirous and criminal bodies. We will read essays, poems, and short stories by Dorothy Allison, Pat Parker, Red Arobateau, and Joan Nestle, among others. Through these writings, we will examine and celebrate ourselves as perverts, outsiders, and revolutionaries.
Ach Kab is a butch Arab worker with the Industrial Workers of the World. Their practice is grounded in deep support and collaboration, working primarily as an arts administrator, theater electrician, production manager, and grant writer. They love to dance, craft, wrestle, play the banjo, explore secrets, and listen.
Em Tillotson is a community archivist and historian, activist, carpenter, and angry working-class butch dyke. M organizes intergenerational community spaces and events with the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, where she helps transform archiving into a relational practice—one that centers queer joy and the slow labor of collective memory. A strong believer in direct action, Em is currently facing state repression—alongside other dykes and trans folks—for her anti-Zionist activism.
SPRING/SUMMER 2025
Sino-Optimism, Techno-Orientalism, & Futility
facilitated by
Tiny Lei
“Everyone get more Chinese now,” or so we say. This reading group will critique—or celebrate?—the topic of the so-called Chinese Century by engaging with related concepts such as sinofuturism/optimism and techno-orientalism. In this landscape, what does Chinese-ness entail?
tiny lei is an artist, ethnic studies scholar, and writer currently residing in oakland, california. her work focuses primarily on the topic of sino diaspora and movement — physical or figurative.
facilitated by
Kelly Neuner
In this group, we’ll explore feminist approaches to the Internet and techno-social spaces and systems through Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index, a catalog of more than 700 entries spanning academic articles to net art. We’ll pair readings with other digital media cataloged in the Index across thematic areas like technodiversity, the sexual history of the Internet, and sonic cyberfeminism – informed by the group’s specific interests – and attend Mindy Seu’s next performance lecture in November. Through discussion and optional written and/or creative reflections, we’ll expand our understanding of the histories, presents, and possible futures of our cyberspaces.
Kelly Neuner (they/them) is a designer, researcher, and artist who likes to learn about the past and present and dream about the future. They are interested in collective imagination and exploring the relationships between society, culture, and technology. They are a member of Design Science Studio, a cultural incubator focused on creating equitable and regenerative futures, where they work on participatory art projects, workshops, and worldbuilding.
facilitated by
Danielle Shi
Where do we begin with keeping a regular record of events, written on the daily? How do we architect a place for the passage of time to find a home, to allow our vagueness and fuzziness to take form? We’ll open up diaries by Sei Shonagon, Anaïs Nin, Sarah Manguso, Roland Barthes, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka for our own perusal, exploring concepts like dailiness, creativity, and grief and the specter of war, as well as the aesthetic possibilities of the diary form, its shapeliness.
Danielle Shi (she/her) is a Chinese-born writer and photographer based in Berkeley, Calif., working on a novel manuscript, The Shelter. She blogs at danielleshi.com and can be found in-residence at Kala Art Institute this cold season, learning some photography chops. She runs the chapbook press Doll Hair with her partner Tim.
facilitated by
Brenna Wood Fitzpatrick
Everyone’s obsessed with the end of the world: the rich are busy building bunkers, robots, and spaceships, asking daring questions like, “How best do I control the help during an apocalypse? Perhaps with a shock collar?”; the zealots see a genocide and rejoice that perhaps it is a stepping stone to their glorious Rapture and ascension; the Silicon Valley geeks are grovelling to become the favorite pet of their prophesized AI overlords; meanwhile, even the fascists seem to have given up on trying to sell us on their Glorious Future™, since who believes in a future anymore, anyways? (Well, I do.) We’ll explore these different popular ideas and fantasies about the “end of the world,” but also practice imagining what the future could look like after we have all done absolutely everything in our power to fight facism, climate change and oppression.
Brenna is an Oakland-based tenant attorney. She grew up in Silicon Valley before moving to the East Bay to study environmental sociology and environmental philosophy. She’s been involved in anti-displacement advocacy ever since, and has no plans to move to Mars.
facilitated by
Avery Huetter & Michelle Ngo
Welcome to our hospicing modernity reading group! If you’re someone that’s critical of colonialism and interested in what it means to transform society from the roots, we’d love to share the book Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira with you.
Michelle Ngô (she/they) is an emerging Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioner rooted in Oakland, CA, where they are growing, healing, and co-creating alongside a vibrant and supportive community. Their practice is deeply informed by an openness to multiple forms of art, expression, and healing. It spans ancestral traditions, experimental poetics, ritual, and everyday acts of care
Avery is a massage therapist and journalism fellow. She grew up in Oakland, getting an associates from Laney before heading to New Orleans for a Bachelors in Sociology. For fun she enjoys reading, dancing, and taking way too many art classes!
facilitated by
Finnegan Clegg
Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers (originally written in a Parisian prison on the backs of paper bags) was recieved upon publication as “homosexual, criminal, perverse, religious, sacrilegious, schizophrenic, honest, appalling, incredible.” This reading group is for anyone interested in reading one of the most bizarre and imaginative books ever written, and digging into a discussion on beauty, depravity, and sexuality.
Finn Clegg is a lover of the strange and beautiful. He is currently living in Oakland and spends most of his time reading and playing music. He also attends Laney College.
facilitated by
Aja Lenae (they/them)
honoring historical, conceptual, artistic, and spiritual practices of liminality, we will read and discuss Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ M Archive: After the End of the World (a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm). as we are tasked with navigating the destabilizing crossroads of so many personal, relational, communal, and global endings, how can we nurture our comfortability with the grey, the in-between, the mysterious and obscured in service to the new liberatory worlds we are building and dreaming of? this group is open to all desiring to learn from lineages of Queer Black feminist co-learning in right relationship.
aja lenae (they/them) (pronounced like “asia”) is a multi-devotional creator, awe connoisseur, teacher, lifelong student, community weaver and youth collaborator rooted and raised in the bay area, california. they are interested in multi-artform storytelling as an act of bridging time and sunning our hard things softened. their offerings are soiled in their prayers for liberation and generational healing.
facilitated by
Vika
The ongoing Haitian revolutionary project is an imperative to create. Black radical intellectuals and artists have long turned to the Haitian Revolution—its history, figures, and symbols—in their theorizations of a global revolutionary project. This reading group explores the Haitian Revolution and its particular understanding of “humanism,” with an eye toward the ways this understanding has been taken up in Black radical critique, as well as its significance for anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggle in the present.
Vika (she/they) is a multimedia artist, scholar, and musician. She is currently a Doctoral Candidate in comparative literature (French, English, and Spanish). Her dissertation intervenes in contemporary post-colonial readings of the Haitian Revolution and Black radical tragedy that render its history, figures, and politics in terms of foreclosure as tragic.
facilitated by
Muffy Koster
Whether as a forum for representing struggles on the factory floor, a podium for speaking against colonial domination, or a framework for working out theoretical concepts of social change, the play has operated as a container for expressions of the political will of the people for over a century. This series will feature scripts and treatises on theatricality from the last one hundred years that configure theater as a realm of praxis where the proletariat, the colonized, and their advocates can rehearse for the revolution.
Muffy Koster is a community archivist, movement artist, and writer living in San Francisco. She is also a Performance Studies PhD student at UC Berkeley, where she is studying the intersections of performance and the workplace.
facilitated by
Kelly Donohue
I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman is a gorgeous and freaky novel about a young woman coming of age on an alien(??) planet and trying to make meaning of it all. Originally written in 1995, it’s been having a MAJOR resurgence since being re-released in 2022. But what is it about the idea of being raised in captivity with 39 other women in an underground prison that the collective is finding so resonant? In this group we’ll try to figure it out.
Kelly Donohue is a poet/researcher/astrologer/teacher who spends a lot of time thinking about systems and parties.
facilitated by
Jack Lembke
Especially in The Bay, the very earth beneath our feet presents us with the ultimate opportunity to explore the felt interplay of time and space. Awe is a step away! Curious adventurers like you and I will converge for conversations and field trips across The Bay. Opholite of the Contra Costa Hills, fortified cliffs of the Marin Headlands, and other wonders provide the literal landscape of our history. From page to pavement, let’s step outside and play in the reverberations of deep time together!
Jackson Lembke
Born Jackson Lembke
Sept. 19 1996
6'2
Blood Type A-
& Parenting
facilitated by
Margaret McCarthy
How do art-making and parenthood inspire, challenge, and oppose each other? For decades, parenthood, especially the role of the mother and/or primary caretaker, has been popularly understood as antithetical to art-making. We call bullsh*t. Let’s read extracts from some of the very recent and exciting books exploring the work and lives of artist parents current and historical, the obstacles they/we face, and how these dual, vital, roles illuminate each other.
Margaret McCarthy (she/her) is a writer, performer, nonprofit executive, and proud mother of her favorite three-year-old. She has performed her work at SOMArts, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Artist Television Access, and for nine years as an ensemble member of the San Francisco Neo-Futurists, where she also served as Co-Artistic Director. She is on the board of the Center for Artistic Activism.
facilitated by
Elizabeth Barelli
This reading group explores how women reclaim identity and power through writing, memory, and creative expression. Across memoir, essay, criticism, and art, these works examine the act of looking back—whether into personal pasts, inherited traumas, or cultural narratives—not as nostalgia, but as a radical form of freedom. Together, they show how rewriting stories and re-seeing history can transform both self and society, giving women agency to author their lives beyond silence, constraint, and erasure.
Elizabeth is a visual artist and community organizer.he way humans relate to art, the blurry lines between the natural and the human-made, and the nature of the creative process. She draws references from philosophy, feminist theory, mythology and literature to illustrate personal narratives.
She created MAD, a support community and book club for Mothers in Art and Design in the Bay Area reclaiming their creative practice, with a growing Mother's Library; and she is currently working on participative art projects around the concept of Care.
facilitated by
Vincente Perez, PhD &
Tala aka Mecca Monarch
Despair and surrender are impossible choices when you are caregiving. Even when it feels like the end of the world, bellies must be filled, minds must be activated, and lessons must be passed on. We will read and experiment with how to do communal caregiving in the midst of social upheaval in an educational, kid friendly, accessible, covid conscious setting that returns us back to experimentation and play.
Dr. Vincente Perez (He/They) is a poet and scholar working at the intersection of poetry, Hip-Hop, and critical theory. He believes poetry molds the mind otherwise. His poems have appeared in his chapbook Other Stories to Tell Ourselves as well as Huizache, Obsidian, Electric Literature, and more.
Tala Khanmalek | mecca monarch (all pronouns) is a queer, disabled, Iranian writer, editor, scholar and activist living in South Berkeley with their toddler.
facilitated by
Rachel Sure
The work and art of caring for each other and the earthly plane twists into defiance when confronting the enclosure of care work and the commons—criminalizing our solidarity to each other and the earth’s survival. We will read texts exemplifying radical acts of caring solidarity, as well as exploring the development and hegemony of modern concepts of ‘health/care”. Discussions will elicit inquiry and action towards deep care as revolutionary praxis.
Rachel Sure (they/she) is an anarchist, harm reductionist, and defiant careworker inside and outside the medical industrial complex. They coordinate gathering spaces of solidarity and discussion amongst affinity groups in the far/hard/post-left persuasion.
facilitated by
Beatrice Kilat
From Pepe le Pew to the Shitty Media Men List, come explore the etiology and persistence of the sex pest throughout popular culture and in particular in radical, anarchic and leftist spaces. We will watch contemporary programs, read classic texts, current articles and miscellaneous tweets as we consider and confront the sex pest as a source of interpersonal and community conflict.
Beatrice Kilat is a writer and critic in Berkeley.
facilitated by
Kaeiolu
From emptiness and humility (read: yin), we will begin to study the I Ching, a sacred Book of Changes that is the foundation for an enormous breadth of Asian cultural cosmology and history. The interpretation we will focus on is by Benebell Wen, a Taiwanese American Taoist and occultist. With study, divination practice, and collective intention-setting, we may observe the changes to find clarity and orient ourselves to the values we hope to grow.
Kaeiolu
facilitated by
Jenny
Step one in becoming a witch: Learn from the witches that came before. In this course we’ll read Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, which examines the subjugation and destruction of women via witch hunting in the transition to capitalism. Federici illuminates how the enclosure of reproductive labor, destruction of women’s social relationships, and utter extermination of magical belief form the invisible underbelly of the capitalist monster. We’ll discuss how witchcraft and witch hunting shape/challenge/queer our relationships with feminism, spirituality, and community care in the belly of the beast. This class is for anyone interested not only in understanding magic and witchcraft as historical artifact, but as the yet-alive vessels through which we may build toward re-enchanted and decolonial futures.
jenny (they/them) is a human on earth (oakland) trying to learn things and build things. they like reading and climbing and looking for crabs by the bay.
facilitated by
Niki Franco
Colonized people across the global south (Third World) adapted Marxist theory and praxis into their own respective contexts and sprouted revolution across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, challenging the idea of Western supremacy and hegemony.
As the US enters an increasingly fascistic political juncture, this reading group is an invitation to sit with the texts and traditions of Black and brown revolutionaries. We will explore how they adapted revolutionary praxis to their own cultural and material contexts. Our goal is not to idolize or simply historicize, but to actively engage with their lessons to inform our own visions, strategies, and actions for building a liberated future from Oakland to the rest of the world.
Niki Franco is a queer Black Caribbean community organizer, writer, and facilitator of spaces for collective study. Her work experiments with truth telling, radical history, and revolutionary imagination.
Niki is also the host of the podcast Getting to the Root of It with Venus Roots and is currently the Co-Director of Dissenters, a national anti-imperialist youth organization.
Her forthcoming debut book, unveiling the CIA's entanglements between Miami, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, is set to publish in 2026 by 1804 Books.
facilitated by
Kassandra Mayhew, Ricky Mack
Are we all traumatized? What is trauma and what is not? What role does class, media, and history play in how we define trauma? This reading group will attempt to examine the definitions of trauma and commodification of trauma and the concept of healing through books, articles, and other media that address “trauma culture.” Mental health providers and consumers of therapy are all encouraged to join!
Kassandra is a psychotherapist in training and former communications strategist from Oakland with a background in media studies and literature. She sometimes organizes and sometimes lays in the sun.
Ricky Mack is a transgender relational psychotherapist in Oakland working in community based mental health. His therapeutic work focuses on navigating how to integrate complex trauma and find fulfillment through post traumatic growth.
(and hopefully, ourselves)
facilitated by
Kelly Egan
Let’s oppose the pace of everything else and gather in the dark heart of January to slowly read Proust aloud together. Like, the first 50 pages or so of Swann’s Way. I imagine this as a brainwave-changing experience, as well as a sort of subliminal and osmotic master class in writing or thinking about the details of our own interiority. Hot drinks and sweets, obviously.
Kelly Egan is a poet, amateur diviner, and student of the occult arts. She has an MFA in poetry from Saint Mary’s College of CA and has authored two poetry chapbooks—Millennial, from White Stag, and A Series of Septembers, from Dancing Girl Press. She studies astrology, tarot, dreamwork, and the paranormal in official and unofficial settings.
facilitated by
Ach Kab, Em Tillotson
This is a space for working class lesbians to gather and connect about our desirous and criminal bodies. We will read essays, poems, and short stories by Dorothy Allison, Pat Parker, Red Arobateau, and Joan Nestle, among others. Through these writings, we will examine and celebrate ourselves as perverts, outsiders, and revolutionaries.
Ach Kab is a butch Arab worker with the Industrial Workers of the World. Their practice is grounded in deep support and collaboration, working primarily as an arts administrator, theater electrician, production manager, and grant writer. They love to dance, craft, wrestle, play the banjo, explore secrets, and listen.
Em Tillotson is a community archivist and historian, activist, carpenter, and angry working-class butch dyke. M organizes intergenerational community spaces and events with the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, where she helps transform archiving into a relational practice—one that centers queer joy and the slow labor of collective memory. A strong believer in direct action, Em is currently facing state repression—alongside other dykes and trans folks—for her anti-Zionist activism.
Abolitionist Possibilities will dive into Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072, by Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O'Brien and Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction edited by Joshua Whitehead. Together, we will time travel to the liberated future, where Black trans Indigiqueers live in harmony with the land. Weaving voices from various perspectives, we will think critically about what we can do in the present to shift timelines towards that vision:
“Am I what I love? Is this the glittering world I've been longing for?”
—Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem.
XTRA.DAE is a queer trans experimental performance artist residing in Ohlone Land in Oakland, California, and originally from South Korea. Daeun Hwang is also a Community Organizer and has worked to curate community-building workshops and events that inform their exploration of community in the Diaspora. Using documentation from their life, Xtra.dae uses the life of Daeun Hwang to push reflection and exploration of the nonbinary in gender, queerness, and Asianness.
Gaia WXYZ (pronounced “wise”) is a multimedia artist, multi-instrumentalist, and cartoonist living in Oakland, CA. They create autobiographical comics about being BlaQueer, chronically ill and radical. They hold an MFA in Comics from California College of the Arts, and currently teach there. They also teach the first ever comic art classes at UC Berkeley. They appear in No Straight Lines, the groundbreaking LGBTQ+ comics documentary, and in 2022 their comic The Tale of Daisy and Gaia was featured along Market Street in San Francisco. Their eagerly anticipated sci-fi comic series, SupaClusta is slated to be released in the near future.
Funny Games Peach Kander
We’ll begin by reading shorter selections from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations, and The Blue and Brown Notebooks, before determining which text we want to tackle together as a whole over the course of a number of weeks. That will be supplemented by selections of text from people who play interesting types of 'language games' in their work. I’ll provide some (along the lines of Renee Gladman, Anne Boyer, Anne Garréta, Harriette Mullen, Sarah Kane, Samuel Beckett, Solmaz Sharif, Claudia Rankine, the list could go on), but plan to add based on suggestions from others in the group. I’ll come in with some open-ended questions each week, with discussions that I hope will be less academic and more focused on how we see these concepts embedded in the day to day, and how we might be able to weave them into our own art practices and activism. I'll provide pdfs of things, and maybe we'd even do a screening of the Haneke film.
Peach Kander is a queer poet and dioramist who holds an MFA from NYU, and is currently in the ensemble of Opera Lab Berlin as a writer/collaborator. They were the poetry editor at Pigeon Pages and Washington Square Review, and were a recipient of a City Artist Corps Grant from New York Foundation for the Arts and a residency from Art Farm Nebraska. Their chapbook MAGIC BOX is out now from Ursus Americanus Press and their writing has appeared in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books), as well as various online and print journals.
The University: What Was, Is, and Can it Be Good For Stephanie Reist
Classroom, library, archive, laboratory, curator, ivory tower, landlord, weapons manufacturer, and snitch. The university—as physical location and ideal—has long been a site of contention. This reading group will explore the myriad faces of the university, and the possibilities for radical change that it both promises and thwarts through readings by June Jordan, Fred Moten and Stefan Harney, and Davarian Baldwin among others.
Stephanie Reist is a writer, educator, and translator from outside of Chicago. She is currently a lecturer in Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric and got her PhD in Latin American Cultural Studies at Duke University. Her multidisciplinary and multimedia dissertation includes a co-directed and edited documentary on race, class, urban mobility, and access to higher education in Rio de Janeiro. She also runs, cooks, and background sings with Neblinas del Pacífico, a local San Francisco band playing music from the Afro-Colombian Pacific.
This 6-week series will contextualize Dump Site, a submission-based repository of deleted media, our collective trash folder. Dump Site collects digital trash to examine the conditions of deletion, a mechanism that shapes cultural memory. Our group will explore the landscape of deleted files and the preservation of them—touching on archival mess, born-digital cultures, and tech sovereignty. The guest speakers and readings will draw from archival practice, digital piracy, queer studies, discard studies, and digital humanities. This syllabus is gathered by Dump Site co-founders, Ven Qiu and Dorothy Tang, with the help of their besties, mentors, and fellow high screen-time netizens.
Ven Qiu is a memory worker and creative technologist based in the Bay Area, co-parented by Chinese immigrants and the internet. They draw from their work as a tattooer, archivist, and researcher to explore the textures of memory and archival practice. Their work most often involves oral history, field recording, body-art, scent, and born-digital media. Qiu also moonlights as a meme admin.
Dorothy Tang is an archivist interested in translating memories and emotions through a variety of mediums, such as oral history, digital expression, and scent. Their work is informed by community archival practices, which center collective ownership, reflection and sense making. Their research interests include: information and power; sensory-based archival activation; and nontraditional repositories.
Summer of Changing Light Kelly Egan
Formalist poetics meet something like science fiction in James Merrill’s epic occult poetic trilogy, The Changing Light at Sandover, composed in collaboration with otherworld voices via the ouija board. We’ll start by parsing through the more dense formal layers of The Book of Ephraim, where Merrill sets the stage for the wild pedagogies in atomic science, celestial hierarchy, and soul density transmitted via more raw dictation in Mirabell: Books of Number and Scripts for the Pageant. Meeting Merrill’s collaborative writing approach with a collaborative reading approach, we’ll consider the possibility that humanity as we know it is the most recent in a series of experiments in world-building, while exploring the formal shifts and breakdowns that characterize the poet as medium. We’ll meet outdoors in the hour of changing light.
Kelly Egan is a poet, amateur diviner, and student of various occult arts. She received an MFA in poetry from Saint Mary’s College of CA and has authored two poetry chapbooks—Millennial, from White Stag, and A Series of Septembers, from Dancing Girl Press. She studies astrology, tarot, dreamwork, and the paranormal in both official and unofficial settings.
Witches Only: HP Lovecraft and Stephen King can’t sit with us Elena Noyes
The focus of this reading group is to discuss how horror plays an important role in examining and subverting societal norms and expectations. For years, the world of horror has excluded the voices of queer, feminist and/or BIPOC authors from telling their stories. This has left lovers of this genre with tired tropes and plots that reinforce heteronormative, Christian values. From the neo-gothic horror of Caitlin R Kiernan, body horror of Lesley Nneka Arimah to the world of slashers with Stephen Graham Jones, we will read to exorcise years of exclusionary horror from our systems.
Elena Noyes has been bothering friends and family about the cultural and societal significance of horror for too long. Through this group, she is excited to discuss important works with others who share her passion. When not actively curating her goth bathroom or finding more skulls to put around her apartment, she is in grad school for a degree in sustainable solutions (which is a horror all its own)
In this reading group we will read all five of Dennis Cooper’s “George Miles novels.” These five novels, written between the late 80s and the early 00s, make a unique experiment in the representation of “bad gays”—men who, for whatever reasons, can’t resist the draw of vices as various as drug abuse, murder, and pedophilia. Our central question will be why, at a time when so many gay men were being shielded by the ever growing normalization of homosexuality, would Cooper choose to drag his narrators, and even himself, through the blood and heroine of crafting this five novel cycle?
Jared Robinson got his PhD in English Literature and Critical Theory from UC Berkeley in August of 2024. Since then, he has worked in Berkeley’s Division of Undergraduate Education focusing on expanding research opportunities for students in the Arts and Humanities. He is also a sometimes poet, a one time dramaturg, and yes, something of an evil gay.
Tackling Jon Fosse's Septology Series TogetherJoanne Furio
Reading a difficult text is always easier in a group. So together we will take on the Septology series of books by the 2023 Nobel Prize-winning author Jon Fosse. The series asks the questions: What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Septology has been praised for its breakthrough form—the entire series is one 600-page long sentence devoid of a single period—and mystical message, heavy on Catholic symbolism and liturgical cadence, reflecting Fosse’s conversion to Catholicism in 2012. If we have time, we'll also read his slim volume, A Shining.
Joanne Furio is a writer of personal essays and an award-winning journalist at Berkeleyside, where she writes about books and culture. She received an MFA in creative writing from Saint Mary’s College of California in 2016 and has been teaching in its Jan Term program ever since—including, most recently, a class on banned books.
Uncharted Worlds Kate Kuaimoku
Let’s read about how we can change our future! Inspired by world building, phenomenology and merging of spaces this book group would be exploring speculative, social, and political themes of the bay area and beyond. The discussions of how to create community, buildings, and support for the future from the proposed readings. Authors will include science fiction novelist Ursula K. Leguin, Alexis Madrigal, Setha Low, and Lee Smith.
Kate Kuaimoku has found their way back to the Bay Area after pursuing a Fine Arts degree while living on a houseboat on the River Lea. As a sculptor, maker, and thinker I’m looking to continue my research into the politics of space as I continue my research into consumer waste and depository systems, supply chains, and the global effects of bauxite mining in the global south.
WINTER 2024/25
Let’s examine the ways that reality TV reflects issues of class, identity, politics, and specifically gender. We’ll use popular reality TV franchises such as The Simple Life and Real Housewives as a framework to prod the labor of being watched. We’ll think about our cultural fascination with the “real,” when it comes to these high maintenance women of the silver screen.
Hi! I am holiday, an art director working at the intersection of beautiful images and capitalism. I enjoy pop culture, celebrity gossip, crafting, and my two cats and am in the top .001 percent of Charli XCX listeners.
How do art-making and parenthood inspire, challenge, and oppose each other? For decades, parenthood, especially the role of the mother and/or primary caretaker, has been popularly understood as antithetical to art-making. We call bullsh*t. Let’s read extracts from some of the very recent and exciting books exploring the work and lives of artist parents current and historical, the obstacles they/we face, and how these dual, vital, roles illuminate each other.
Margaret McCarthy (she/her) is a writer, performer, nonprofit executive, and proud mother of her favorite two-year-old. She was the Executive and Co-Director of Southern Exposure (2019-2024), an ensemble member of the San Francisco Neo-Futurists (2014-2023), and the First Female President of the U.S.A (FFPOTUS, 2017-2021).
with Danny Spitzberg
Freedom is an Endless Meeting by Francesca Poletta argues that meetings are the fundamental unit of democracy, and the book cover gestures at that ideal. Meanwhile, ancient television enjoyers remember Alec Baldwin as a cliche corporate executive on 30 Rock quoting from Meetings Magazine. What do we want from meetings? What do they want from us? Suggested readings and light snacks provided.
Danny Spitzberg is a sociologist. He’s interested in cooperatives, personal narratives, resisting cultural assimilation, and community research methods. He currently works at UC Berkeley on a study about opportunities for co-ops to create high quality jobs in historically low-wage sectors. Before that, he facilitated worker-led research with a staffing and training co-op based in Oakland, California.
with Nisha Sudarsanam
In this class, we'll read excerpts of feminists across the world. We'll explore what makes them different, similar or simply incomparable. The hope at the end of the class is that perspectives of feminism expands beyond traditional western literature. Readings might include Vandana Singh, Rosario Castellanos and Clarice Lispector among others.
Nisha Sudarsanam enjoys exploring anything created at the intersection of colonialism, women, art and food. She lives in Oakland, CA with an overactive cat that wanders through fruit trees and deer.
with Rena Tom
Craft has played (and continues to play) a huge role in shaping cultural, social, and economic development around the world … so why is “craft” a pejorative? Let’s reclaim this particular C word together as we explore the power of the craft imaginary. We’ll read texts that examine why craft has been historically feminized, marginalized, and devalued, then consider how craft is not just about creating tangible objects — it’s about creating the future you want. Along the way, we’ll discuss the state of craftivism, where handmade fits into the digital era, and how craft creates visibility for disadvantaged communities.
Rena Tom is a maker, curator, and donut enthusiast based in Berkeley, CA. Her research-based art/craft practice focuses on objects that destabilize and reframe everyday experience. She currently works with found photos, Mylar film, and other shiny things to create weavings, books, and site-specific installations that address personal and systemic issues around identity, privacy, and representation.
with Olivia White Lopez
This reading group will be the first in an ongoing series focusing on books about the lives of creative women. This session’s text (along with some optional additional readings) will be All Fours by Miranda July.
Olivia White Lopez (she/they/ella) is a nonprofit leader and equity strategist who loves to build community and hang out with cats. In her day job she helps connect people to nature and people to each other as the Director of Culture, Equity and Belonging for the Peninsula Open Space Trust. She also moonlights as the Co-Vice President of Southern Exposure, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting emerging and mid-career artists. When she isn’t nonprofit administrating she likes to spend time communing with nature and other creatively-inclined types.