Queer Caribbean Music and Poetry
Queer Cultural Center presents:
Out and About: Queer Caribbean Music and Poetry
Friday – October 19, 2018 | 7-9pm
African American Art and Culture Complex
760 Fulton Avenue, San Francisco
FREE Event – Everyone is Welcome.
Rich and varied, queer Caribbean history and culture is an inspiration and dynamic resource to contemporary artists and performers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“Out and About” features talented poets, musicians, and singers of the Caribbean diaspora.
In their moving works, they explore roots and routes, interpreting personal and family narratives and composing new futures.
Watch Videos of the Event:
Artists Include: Tory Teasley, Kay Williams, Damali, Nicholas Vontex Chin, and Mona Webb.
Tory Teasley is a vocalist, activist, and entrepreneur. They have musical background in
classical music, jazz and Yoruba folkloric music. Tory paints the atmosphere with power house vocal acrobatics and mesmerizing stage performances. Singing her original music. Come dance and sing along with Tory and The Teasers!
Kay Williams – Kay is a creative living in the Bay Area. They will be presenting their project Tallawah, a piece honoring her young daughters journey through medical adversity. Kay hails from Jamaican and Guyanese parents and her ancestry speaks through her artistic expression.
Damali – is a Jamaican poet and spiritual activist living in the Bay. She is an evolving creative seeking to effect positive change in the world through her art (beginning with herself). She’s been writing poetry for 30+ years and has plans to publish books and produce films. With two grown kids and a day job, her creative energies emerge on weekends and in the wee hours of the morning. Her poetry is part brokenness, part beauty, and all truth telling. She is Creative Director of the Souls of Women project. The project captures three fierce Jamaican women in video vignettes, illuminating their spiritual, creative, and healing journeys (journeys we’re all taking, in one way or another).
Nicholas Vontex Chin – is an East Bay Jamaican/Chinese/Polish Queer performance poet with an electrifying stage presence that brings the written word to life. Chin writes original poetry in a free flowing narrative style that attempts to find the commonality of experience shared throughout our intersecting identities and backgrounds: race, gender, migration, sexuality, the environment, class, and self-love are common themes explored through their work. Most recently Chin was sponsored by the Queer Cultural Center to perform their “3083 Mile Journey,” a poetic exploration of family, queerness, and love for the Emerging Artist Showcase Embrace featured in the 2018 National Queer Arts Festival.
Mona Webb – Scholar practitioner, teaching performance artist and activist Ramona “Mona” Webb serves as the Associate Artistic Director of The Queer Cultural Center producers of the National Queer Arts Festival . For 9 years Mona Webb formally served as Artistic Director of Project ABLE and Lyrical Minded415, which is an Art Based Learning for Equity seasonal course implemented in SFUSD schools. For nine years Mona served as Slammaster and Host of San Francisco’s The City Poetry Slam which produced a team she Co-coached with Kim Johnson and Jaylee Alde that won 3rd in the Nation. Mona is a conservatory trained artist who writes and performs in “docu-ritual- drama theater and is currently aat California Institute of Integral Studies “How to Catch a Rapist in 12 Parts”, her current work in progress has recently appeared at Piano Fight Theater, CounterPULSE and Brava Theater in San Francisco. As the Director of The Press Play Poets theater performances and as an artist Ramona seeks to create new platforms for all avenues of artistic expression in all that she produces.
Funded by a generous grant from Cal Humanities.
