Grace Notes: Poetry at Grace Cathedral

Celebrate National Poetry Month with Litquake, the largest independent literary festival on the West Coast. Returning for our 10th year to this gloriously Gothic space, enjoy a special evening of exalted verse with poetry in the pews from a distinguished roster of poets. Curated and hosted by D.A. Powell and Preeti Vangani, four celebrated poets will share their work: Armen Davoudian, Rachel Richardson, Maw Shein Win, and Matthew Zapruder. A book sale and signing will follow the readings. Book sales provided by Green Apple Books.

FREE, $5-10 suggested donation.

Armen Davoudian is the author of The Palace of Forty Pillars (Tin House), long-listed for the National Book Critics' Circle Award in Poetry, and the translator, from Persian, of Hopscotch by Fatemeh Shams. He grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and is a PhD Candidate in English at Stanford University.

Rachel Richardson is the author of Smother (Norton, 2025) and two earlier poetry collections, Copperhead and Hundred-Year Wave. She is the co-founder of Left Margin LIT as well as a former Stegner and NEA Fellow. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Yale Review, APR, and elsewhere. In 2024 she was named an inaugural Artists-in-Fire Resident through the Confluence Lab, and is now trained as an FFT2 wildland firefighter.

Maw Shein Win's latest full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Her work has recently been published in The American Poetry Review, The Margins, The Bangalore Review, and other journals. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at USF and is a member of The Writers Grotto.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of I Love Hearing Your Dreams (Scribner, 2024), and five previous collections of poetry, as well as Why Poetry (Ecco/Harper Collins) and Story of a Poem (Unnamed). He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. He teaches in the MFA in creative writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Preeti Vangani grew up in Mumbai, India and is the author of the poetry collection Mother Tongue Apologize (2019), selected as winner of the RL Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, and Hobart, among other journals. She is the recipient of the 2022 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. An alumni of the program, she currently teaches at the MFA program at University of San Francisco.

D. A. Powell's books include Repast (Graywolf, 2014) and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf, 2012), the latter a recipient of the Northern California Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. His honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize, and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at University of San Francisco.

Host or Publisher Litquake, San Francisco's Literary Festival