Invocation of Poetry Stage + Carrying the Land: Bodies and Belonging

Invocation of the Poetry stage by Nick Johnson The future is not a clean horizon. In Carrying the Land: Bodies and Belonging, five poets consider how land lives within us and how we are shaped by the terrains we cross, inherit, and survive. If the future is to be imagined differently, it must begin with what we are already carrying. Abi Pollokoff writes with a fierce tenderness toward landscape and longing, tracing how intimacy with place can be both sanctuary and fracture. Kenneth Wong's work moves through family history and cultural memory, illuminating how inherited stories become tools for navigating what comes next. Daniel Moysaenko's poems dwell in displacement and reinvention, where language itself becomes a provisional homeland. Wendy M. Thompson grounds her work in community and witness, exploring how bodies marked by history still insist on joy, survival, and transformation. Moderated by Maw Shein Win whose own poetry dissolves the boundary between self and ecosystem, and reality and the magical. This reading considers the body as archive, as borderland, as blueprint. These poets do not offer utopia. They offer something more durable: language rooted enough to hold grief, bright enough to grow possibility. This event took place in Downtown Berkeley, at the Bay Area Book Festival, May 29-31 2026.  Support our work and help to keep the Bay Area Book Festival 96% free! https://givebutter.com/writingthefuture Check out our upcoming events www.baybookfest.org Follow us on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/baybookfest/