Litquake returns for the eighth year for this special evening of exalted verse, celebrating the sacred and profane, domestic and divine, with poetry in the pews from a distinguished roster of poets. Curated and hosted by D.A. Powell and Preeti Vangani, the lineup features readings from Gillian Conoley, Jane Hirshfield, Vandana Khanna, J. Michael Martinez, and sam sax.  

Books available for sale onsite. Support your local authors and booksellers! 

FREE, $5-$10 suggested donation  

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About the Poets

Gillian Conoley is a poet, editor, and translator. Her new collection is Notes from the Passenger (Nightboat Books, May 2023). The author of ten collections of poetry, Conoley received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was awarded the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Fund for Poetry Award. A Little More Red Sun on the Human, also with Nightboat, won the 39th annual Northern California Book Award in 2020. Conoley’s translations of three books by Henri Michaux, Thousand Times Broken, appearing in English for the first time, is with City Lights. 

 Writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), Jane Hirshfield is the author most recently of The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Knopf, 2023); two collections of essays; and four books collecting and co-translating world poets from the deep past. Hirshfield’s honors include the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and finalist selection for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Translated into seventeen languages, Hirshfield is a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. 

Born in New Delhi, India, Vandana Khanna is a writer, educator, and editor. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Train to Agra, Afternoon Masala, and Burning Like Her Own Planet, as well as the chapbook, The Goddess Monologues. Her work has won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize, The Miller Williams Poetry Prize, the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition, and the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize. She has been published widely in journals and anthologies such as The New Republic, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, New England Review, Guernica, and The Penguin Book of Indian Poets. 

J. Michael Martinez received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for his first book, Heredities. His latest, In the Garden of the Bridehouse, is available from the University of Arizona Press. He is the poetry editor of NOEMI Press and his writings are anthologized in Ahsahta Press’s The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral, Rescue Press’s The New Census: 40 American Poets, and Counterpath Press’s Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing. 

sam sax is a queer, Jewish writer and educator. They’re the author of Madness, winner of the National Poetry Series, and Bury It, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Their next book of poetry is Pig (Simon & Schuster, 2023). A two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion, they have poems published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, Granta, and elsewhere. Sam has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Yaddo, Lambda Lit, and MacDowell, and is currently serving as an ITALIC Lecturer at Stanford University. 

Event Details

The cathedral will open at 7 pm. Enter the cathedral through the door at the top of the Great Steps. The accessible entrance is via the glass doors on Taylor Street, left of the garage entrance. Turn left down the hallway and follow it to the elevator.