2024 Monterey Poetry Festival

Chris Carr is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary conceptual artist, photographer, emcee, educator and instrumentalist. In 2010, he founded Brooklyn Wildlife, a creative arts incubator specializing in independent art and music. He hosts podcasts and interview series and have organized hundreds of live events and performances. He’s spent twenty years playing music and have toured more than half the country. Along with Melissa Hunter Gurney, He co-founded the art space Gamba, the GAMBAZine publication, and Black Land Ownership. He leads Diversity and Inclusion workshops and developed Curating the Classroom to help schools deactivate systemic oppression.

Jeff Erwin (he/him) is a local poet, flaneur and raconteur; he lives on the hill with his cat, his teen, and ten thousand books.

Heather Flescher is a disabled trans activist who has taken part in poetry events at Old Capitol for over a decade. She has published two books, “One Foot on the Ground” and “Another Crazy Trans Woman”, and is currently working on a third with a tentative title of “Charmed to the Teeth”. She would like to thank her community of beloved friends, artists, radicals, teachers, warriors and healers, without whom she would not exist.

Pilar Graham is a poet and essayist. Her poetry has appeared in Sundog; Haunted Waters Press; Indent Literary Journal; Finishing Line Press; Blackberry; Voices—amongst other literary journals and anthologies. Publications for her creative nonfiction essays include Essay Daily; The Broiler: A Journal of New Literature; Poetry Midwest; and Pithead Chapel Press. Pilar has served as a literary editor and a judge for local and national writing competitions. Her debut collection of poems, Currents, was published December 2022. Her second collection of poems, Falling, was recently accepted for publication, and is scheduled to be released summer 2024. Pilar teaches at CSU Monterey Bay. She also teaches part-time for Fresno City College as an online instructor. Pilar divides her time between Monterey and the wilderness outside of the southern entrance to Yosemite.

Alex Luceli Jiménez (she/her) is a queer Mexican writer and school counselor in training based in Marina, CA. Her writing has appeared in Barren Magazine, Berkeley Fiction Review, Lunch Ticket, Southwest Review, Moonflowers and Nightshade: An Anthology of Sapphic Horror, Scissor Sisters: An Anthology of Sapphic Villains, and others. She is the author of the poetry collection THIS RAMBLING HEART and is currently revising a queer young adult horror novel in the tradition of CARRIE as part of WriteHive’s mentorship program. Learn more about her work at alexlucelijimenez.com.

Alie Jones is a self-care advocate, writer, artist, and Creole mermaid. She is a founder of Bodacious Bombshells, a wellness collective in Oakland. Alie is passionate about centering our breath work as sacred and hopes to build a legacy of awareness and expression. She is the Director and Co-founder of Black Freighter Press, a revolutionary press committed to the exploration of liberation. Alie graduated with a BA in Cinematic Arts & Technology from CSU Monterey Bay & a minor in Creative Writing & Social Action. She received her MPA from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies as well as a MFA from Mills College in Creative Writing. Alie is the host of the podcast called Chit Chat with Aliecat, exploring self-care practices & journeys of self-love.

Alex Ramirez is a singer/songwriter and musician known for his acoustic guitar based songs. He is best known for a catalog of lo-fi home recordings. Ramirez has a distinctive vocal style, characterized by his “whispery melodic” delivery and uses multi-tracking to create vocal layers and harmonies. Various publications have described his style as Alternative Folk and have pointed out production similarities with that of the early 1970s.

Kenji Rei is a DJ, producer, and songwriter from Marina, CA. He enjoys collaborating with local artists and playing boogie vinyl whenever it’s called for. He is a resident DJ on Sweet Vibrations Radio (UK) with a monthly Neo Soul/Hip-Hop show.

Through the content of his work, award winning Los Angeles based Poet, Music Producer and Activist, Christopher Siders, encourages his audience members to think critically about social norms and how we subconsciously affect one another through our everyday behaviors. Within his own experiences as an activist, he is able to share his successes and failures, and guide future activists at any institution, to make positive decisions for the community to flourish and teach students to become a better ally for movements or areas of interest. Siders graduated from California State University Monterey Bay with a B.A. in Human Communications with a concentration in Creative Writing and Social Action.

Daniel B. Summerhill is a poet and essayist who’s earned fellowships from Baldwin for the Arts and The Watering Hole. He is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Monterey County and has published two collections of poems, Divine, Divine, Divine and Mausoleum of Flowers. His poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets, The Indiana Review, Columbia Journal, Obsidian, Inkwell, Callaloo, Ploughshares, The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. An Oakland native, Daniel lives in the Bay Area and is Assistant Professor of Poetry at Santa Clara University.