Co-sponsored by Works/San José art and performance center! 38 South Second Street, downtown San José.
Open mic to start the show!
If you are unable to attend in person, we welcome you to join via Zoom! Register in advance for this event via Zoom. Link: https://bit.ly/Well-REDoctober2025
Our featured poets:
LeaJay Harper LeaJay Harper is a poet, activist, community organizer, and reporter based in Oakland, California. Drawing from lived experience of houselessness, Harper has become a powerful advocate for housing justice, community self-determination, and media equity. As a Po Poet and PovertySkola, Harper blends poetry with political education, using storytelling to challenge systemic poverty and amplify the voices of those most often silenced. They are a contributing writer for POOR Magazine and Street Spirit, where their work highlights the struggles and resilience of unhoused communities. A resident of Homefulness, a community built by and for people who have experienced homelessness, Harper embodies the principle of creating lasting solutions through collective action. On social media, they describe themself as an Addiction Doula, offering support and advocacy for people navigating recovery and liberation from drug dependency. Harper’s leadership has been visible in grassroots organizing across Oakland, including press conferences and campaigns like those led by Wood Street Commons. Through poetry, reporting, and direct action, Harper continues to work for a future where housing, dignity, and community care are recognized as human rights.
tiny gray-garcia aka #povertySkola tiny (lisa) gray-garcia aka “PovertySkola” is a formerly unhoused, incarcerated, revolutionary journalist, lecturer, poet, visionary, teacher and single mama of Tiburcio, daughter of a houseless, disabled mama Dee, and the co-founder of POOR Magazine/Prensa POBRE/PoorNewsNetwork. With her Mama Dee- she co-founded Escuela de la gente/PeopleSkool- a poor and indigenous people-led skool, as well as several cultural and theatre projects such as the Po Poets Project/Poetas POBREs Proyecto (co-founded with Leroy Moore), welfareQUEENs, the Theatre of the POOR/Teatro de los pobres, and Hotel Voices. In 2011 she co-launched The Homefulness Project - a landless peoples, self-determined land liberation movement in the Ohlone/Lisjan/Huchuin territory known as Deep East Oakland, the Bank of ComeUnity Reparations and co-founded a liberation school for children, Deecolonize Academy and is the creator of a PoemCast from a poverty skola- a podcast series and as well is the co-host of Po Peoples Radio News Hour on PNNKEXU 96.1fm and bi-weekly on KPFA. Tiny has taught Poverty Scholarship, the criminalization of poverty and poor people led liberation, poetry and media at universities and encampments across Mama Earth including Columbia and UC Berkeley. She has authored several essays for The SF Bay View Newspaper, 48 Hills and POOR Magazine as well as books including Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America, co-editor of A Decolonizers Guide to A Humble Revolution, Born & Raised in Frisco and co-author of Poverty ScholarShip - Poor People Theory, Arts, words and Tears Across Mama Earth , How to Not Call PoLice Ever, Po Peoples Survival Guide Through Covid 19 and the Virus of Poverty and the Homefulness Handbook- How to Build a Homeless, Landless peoples solution to homelessness. She also authored two bi-lingual childrens books: The Hardworker/El Trabajado Fuerte and When Mama and Me Lived Outside - one families journey thru homelessness (which has become an award winning animated short movie of the same name) and The Sidewalk Motel - poems and Poshunary from a poverty skola which was released in 2022. In 2021 tiny returned to playwriting with the new play Crushing Wheelchairs, launched with workshops with fellow houseless and formerly houseless, disabled elders and youth soon to be on stage at The Lab and Lower Bottom Playas. After staging this play she wrote her forst original screenplay based on the play and is now releasing the movie Crushing WHeelchairs in 2025 with an all houseless cast- We Aren't Acting We R living, In addition the powerFUlL UnTour Book Across Occupied Turtle Island was released in 2025 - which is the culmination of 9 years of work "UnTouring" stolen and hoarded land across Mama Earth and lifting up indigenous resistance movements and the poetry that lives in that resistance.
Muteado Silencio Indigenous Purepecha/Raza artist, writer, poverty skola, danzante, media producer, teacher and poet from Michoacan, Mexico. Co–teacher and member of the Poetas POBRES/Po Poets Project at Prensa POBRE (POOR Magazine), In/migrant & Indigenous and revolutionary artist & scholar in residence at the Race, Poverty Media Justice Institute, co-founder of Homefulness and staff writer for Voces de inmigrantes en resistencia and community Activist. He is the co-host of Po Peoples Radio on PNNKEXU 96.1fm and creator and host of bilingual radio Voces DE Inmigrantes en resistencia for PNNKEXU. Muteado is an actor, director and writer of several plays with Teatro de los pobres at POOR Magazine and with People of Color Action Theatre (POCAT) "We did not cross the border, the border crossed us". Raised in the East Side of Oakland by his single mother, born in Michoacan made in Oakland in a beautiful community of Black and Brown folks, land of the Homicides and Sideshows. "My pen is my gun, my words are my bullets", Done work with Color Ink, Theater of the Oppress, Oakland Unified School District, Unity Concepts, La Carpa del Feo....Muteado is a co-author of How to NOT Call PoLice Ever, and the Homefulness HandBook on Poorpress and his most recent book is Chimalli: Creando Arte Ceremonial / Creating Ceremonial Art available at poorpress.net
Dee Allen African-Italian performance poet based in Oakland, California. Active on the creative writing & Spoken Word tips since the early 1990s. In the collection of badass poetry released on POOR press in 2019 called Skeletal Black: Poems from Beneath the Poverty Line, Dee tells the story of poverty, arson, displacement and removal us poor people face all the time, through all the evil means that the exploitative inhuman system called capitalism unfolds. Dee is also the author of 3 books [Boneyard, Unwritten Law, and STORMWATER all from POOR Press] and 16 anthology appearances [including Poets 11: 2014, Feather Floating on the Water, Rise, Your Golden Sun Still Shines, The City Is Already Speaking, What is Love and the newest from Vagabond Books, Extreme] under his figurative belt so far. Dee Allen is a member of the Po Poets Project of POOR Magazine and a founding member and resident of Homefulness - a homeless, landless peoples solution to homelessness.
Poetry Center San José is a member supported organization and is funded, in part, by grants from Applied Materials Foundation, the City of San José's Office of Cultural Affairs, Literary Arts Emergency Fund, supported by the Mellon Foundation (@MellonFdn), Knight Foundation, Poets & Writers, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, SVCREATES, in partnership with the County of Santa Clara and the California Arts Council and also supported in part by a SVCreates National Endowment for the Arts American Rescue Plan grant. We also thank Brandenburg Family Foundation and Anne & Mark's Art Party for their generous giving.
