The 12th Annual San José Poetry Festival continues!
This is the third of four days of the 2026 festival! Today’s reading will take place inside the Renzel Room at History Park. This event is free to the public.
The Poets of Resistance reading is made up of poets Jen Siraganian, Deema Shehabi, Farnaz Fatemi and Nathalie Khankan.
Our Poets
Jen Siraganian is an Armenian-American writer, educator, and former Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California. Her debut book, Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead, which won the 2026 Perugia Press Prize and will be released in September 2026, was a finalist for the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize and The Journal’s Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, as well as a semi-finalist for Persea Books’ Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. Her poems have won the New Ohio Review Poetry Prize and have appeared in AGNI, Best New Poets 2015 and 2025, Electric Literature, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, and The Rumpus. A former managing director of Litquake: San Francisco’s Literary Festival, she has received funding from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and is a current Lucas Artist Fellow at the Montalvo Arts Center.
Deema K. Shehabi is a Palestinian-American poet and editor. Deema is the author of Thirteen Departures from the Moon and co-editor with Beau Beausoleil of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, for which she received a Northern California Book Award. She’s also co-author of Water to Water with Marilyn Hacker and winner of the Nazim Hikmet poetry competition in 2018. Deema’s work has appeared in poets.org, Los Angeles Review of Books, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and in the anthologies Heaven Looks like Us and Ask the Night for a Dream.
Farnaz Fatemi, an Iranian American poet from Santa Cruz, CA, is the author of Sister Tongue زبان خواهر (Kent State University Press), selected by Tracy K. Smith, which won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and received a Starred Review from Publisher’s Weekly. Farnaz is a former Santa Cruz County Poet Laureate and founding member of The Hive Poetry Collective, which presents a weekly radio show and podcast in Santa Cruz County and hosts readings and poetry-related events. She is also an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow and California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow. Farnaz’s poems and essays appear in Kenyon Review, RHINO Poetry, Alaska Quarterly Review, No Tokens Journal, Poets.org, Tupelo Quarterly, Terrain.org and elsewhere. More at www.farnazfatemi.com
Nathalie Khankan is a Copenhagen-born writer of Finnish and Syrian descent. She is the author of Quiet Orient Riot, recipient of the 2021 California Book Award in Poetry. Her background includes serving as the founding director of The Danish House in Palestine and teaching Arabic Language and Literature at UC Berkeley. She resides in San Francisco and is currently pursuing a degree in Somatic Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies.Jen SiraganianDeema ShehabiFarnaz FatemiNathalie Khankan
Poetry Center San José's mission is to nurture and promote diverse literary expression in our community as a means of exploring, defining, and enriching the human experience.