Honeysuckle & Nightshade: Release Reading & Discussion

Brennan DeFrisco is a poet, teaching artist, editor, voice actor, & arts coordinator from the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s been a National Poetry Slam finalist, a Pushcart Prize nominee, Grand Slam Champion of the Oakland Poetry Slam, & program coordinator for California Poets in the Schools, Poetry Out Loud, the Redwood Poetry Festival, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. He’s the author of A Heart With No Scars, published by Nomadic Press, Honeysuckle & Nightshade, published by Swimming with Elephants Publications, & has served as poetry editor on the mastheads of Lunch Ticket and the California Poets in the Schools State Anthology. His work has been published in Red Wheelbarrow, Oracle Fine Arts Review, Drunk in a Midnight Choir, Collective Unrest, & elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles.  

Christopher Diaz is a Chamorro poet, freelance photographer, and military veteran. He is a two-time Grand Slam Champion of Houston’s slam poetry team, “Write About Now,” which ranked fifth in the nation in 2018. He has been featured by NBC news, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, Poets & Writers.org, and more. He has previously taught poetry with the non-profit “Writers in the Schools”, and too often spends his time making fake album covers with pictures of his three dogs.

Briana Grace Hammerstrom is a poet from Modesto, CA currently residing in Portland, OR. She has participated in the Individual World Poetry Slam, the National Poetry Slam, and ran Flagstaff Poetry Slam from 2016 to 2019. She was the HBR Haiku Deathmatch Champion of the Redwoods Poetry Festival in 2022. Her work has been showcased in Novus Literary Magazine, Palette Poetry, How We Are, and in other publications across the US. Her poetry is varied- from queer joy to sheer outrage, she discerns magic in mundane language.