Save the Date! Samar Reading Series at KSW

Friday, April 18 7-9pm

KSW @Arc Gallery & Studios

1246 Folsom St. San Francisco, CA

No Cover

Samar will be hosting the sixth installment in their reading series with Kearny Street Workshop at Arc Gallery and Studios on Saturday, April 18th, at 7PM. Featured readers are Tala Khanmalek (mecca monarch), Dāshaun Washington, and David Gorin.

Tala Khanmalek | mecca monarch (all pronouns) is a queer Iranian writer. They earned a PhD in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley and were formerly a professor of gender and sexuality studies. Currently, they are a Creative Capital Award fellow (with poet heidi rhodes), freelance editor, and editorial board member of Apogee Journal. They publish creative--and also scholarly--work across genres and their forthcoming books include An Infinity of Traces (poetry), The Sun Planters (a play), and My Names Means Free (a children's book). 

Dāshaun Washington is a poet from Pittsfield, Massachusetts. His work has received support from Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Lighthouse Works, Ucross Foundation, Millay Arts, and beyond. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, New England Review, The Nation, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He currently lives in San Francisco and is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where he was previously a Wallace Stegner Fellow.

David Gorin is the author of To a Distant Country, selected by Jennifer Chang for the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship and published in 2025. His writing received the 2023 Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America and has been supported by MacDowell, Yaddo, and Millay Arts. In recent years he has taught creative writing and literature at the Pratt Institute, Deep Springs College, Stanford Continuing Studies, the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution (via the Yale Prison Education Initiative), Eastern Correctional Facility (via the Bard Prison Initiative), and Yale. He curates the WAVEMACHINE poetry and performance series in San Francisco and is co-editor of The Constant Critic at Fence.