Aloud / Out Loud: The Writers Grotto

Please join us on Saturday, June 6th! The theme for this Aloud/Out Loud is: Out of Fury Into Grace: Poems & Stories of Reckoning and Resilience.

Join us for a night of readings from Writers Grotto authors and Rooted & Written alumni. Emceed by Leslie Kirk Campbell.

This month's event is co-organized with The Writers Grotto, featuring:

• Arely Miranda González
• Eirinie Carson
• Lama Rimawi
• Lauren C. Johnson
• Lisa Rosenberg
• Sabina Khan-Ibarra

Telegraph Hill Arts and Literature presents writers, poets, and other artists, while giving back to the creative community and to our neighbors. (https://telhilit.org)

Arely Miranda González is a trailblazing expert in technology and media. Her experience on the digital frontlines deeply informs her debut novel, The Platform, a chilling exploration of social media’s dark underbelly and the invisible labor behind content moderation. Arely is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, political essayist for the Mexican magazine Contralínea, and an alum of Rooted & Written, the Writer’s Grotto acclaimed program for BIPOC writers.

Eirinie Carson is an award-winning Black British writer living in California. She writes about sexual taboos, death and dying, illegal substances and hauntings both real and imagined. Her work has appeared in LitHub, Electric Literature, The Sonora Review, The Los Angeles Review, and others. Eirinie's first book, The Dead Are Gods (Melville House, 2023), was critically acclaimed by Oprah Daily, Nylon Magazine, Shondaland, Kirkus Reviews and The Washington Post. Eirinie’s first book of fiction is a maternal gothic novel called Bloodfire, Baby (2026).

Dr. Lama Rimawi is a pediatrician and writer. She co-founded the Institute for the Understanding of Anti-Palestinian Racism and is a Board Member of the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom. A 2023 SF Writer’s Grotto Rooted and Written Fellow and 2024 Mesa Refuge Fellow, she was interviewed by Judy Woodruff on the PBS NewsHour Reframe Festival for her advocacy work. She is completing her first book, You Would Die in Lifta: A Palestinian American Doctor's Story of Betrayal, Racism and Hope.

Lauren C. Johnson attributes her upbringing in Florida–America’s weirdest state–to her interest in the ecological and surreal. She's the interviews editor for The Racket Journal and is a co-founder and editor of Club Chicxulub, a speculative fiction journal and reading series. She also co-hosts Babylon Salon, one of the longest-running reading series in the Bay Area. Her short stories, interviews, and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including The Rumpus and Orion Magazine online. The West Façade is her debut novel.

Lisa Rosenberg is a poet, essayist, and former space program engineer. She served as Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, and has received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, Djerassi Residency, and MOSAIC America Fellowship. Her essays span craft, satire, science, and memoir. Her poems explore interconnectedness across disparate aspects of nature and culture. She is the author of Weeds and Stars (just released from The Word Works) and A Different Physics (2018), poetry collections that reflect decades of polydisciplinary inquiry.

Sabina Khan-Ibarra is a Pashtun Muslim American poet, writer, educator. Her work appears in Anomaly, SWWIM, Rising Phoenix, and iO Literary, and has been recognized by CRAFT and SmokeLong Award for Flash Fiction. Her poetry collection, What My Mouth Holds, is a two-time semifinalist, and she’s  working on a short story collection. She teaches at The Writers Grotto, Litquake, and San Diego Writers Ink, and serves as Director of Rooted & Written. She lives in Half Moon Bay with her family.

The Writers Grotto is a community of working writers and narrative artists who connect in physical and virtual space, pooling their talents to support each other, mentor and teach others, and engage the wider world. The Grotto fosters a literary culture that is generous in spirit and deeply inclusive, elevating writers of all backgrounds. Rooted and Written, sponsored by The Writers Grotto, is the first tuition-free professional creative writing program offered for BIPOC writers in the USA.