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Community Poetry Open Mic and Book Release Party with featured reader, Mia Ayumi Malhotra In-Person
Join us for an evening of poetry at our Community Poetry Open Mic Series and Book Release Party with featured reader, Mia Ayumi Malhotra! Come share a poem or two or sit back and listen. The Open Mic will be followed by a reading and book signing from Mia to celebrate the release of her new book Mothersalt. Books will be available to purchase from the author. Light refreshments will be provided. All poets, poetry enthusiasts, and the poetry curious are welcome.
Please register if you will be sharing your poetry, if you would just like to listen, no need to register.
Adults (18+) please.
The next reading will take place on Wednesday, August 13th and feature James Siegel.
About Mothersalt
"Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s Mothersalt charts—astoundingly, wondrously—the vast territories of the unnarratable that constitute motherhood, revealing to us how maternal caretaking is a locus of astonishing collisions: between profound intimacies and estrangements, mergings and fracturings, awakenings and bewilderments, violences, and heady joys. Malhotra’s poems defy category, capturing motherhood with brilliance, rawness, and urgency. A wholly irreducible translation of what is ultimately outside of representation." —Jenny Xie
MOTHERSALT (May 2025) is an embodied look at birth, motherhood, and child-rearing. With haunting precision, Mothersalt digs into the experience of pregnancy and early motherhood, where the self is split apart and stitched back together. Interspersed with tender addresses to a child in utero, these poems recount the fraught disorientation of giving birth in America, where birthing bodies are not always recognized as empowered agents of their own story, asserting a powerful narrative of what is possible in all forms of human relationships and practices of embodied care.
About Mia
Mia Ayumi Malhotra iis the author of Isako Isako, a California Book Award finalist and winner of the Alice James Award, Nautilus Gold Award for Poetry, National Indie Excellence Award, and Maine Literary Award. She is also the author of the chapbook Notes from the Birth Year. A Kundiman Fellow and a founding member of The Ruby SF, a gathering space for women and nonbinary artists, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.