We are delighted to kick off our sixth season with Play On Words: Live in San Francisco, our return to SF’s inimitable LitCrawl festival. Our summer call for submissions brought in such riches—poems, plays and stories written by amazing people—that it made our job as curators tough. This week we are proud to introduce one of our featured writers for our October 19 event.

Sage Curtis is a Bay Area writer fascinated by the way cities grit and how women move through the world. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Vinyl, Glass Poetry, The Normal School, burntdistrict, Yes Poetry, Juked and more. She has received an honorable mention for the 2017 Wrolstad Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2017 Rita Dove Award in Poetry and the Gigantic Sequins Poetry Award that same year. Also in 2017, she was named one of LitQuake’s Writers on the Verge. Her chapbook, Trashcan Funeral, is available from dancing girl press. 

We are excited to perform her poem, “A Series of Small Apocalypses,” this fall. In the meantime, she agreed to answer a few questions for us.

What inspired you to participate in Play On Words? 

I believe writing is as much about words as it is about community. Part of what is magical about writing is that your words can sound completely different, or mean something completely new, depending on who is reading them. This is what is unique and inspirational about Play On Words. 

Which writers or performers inspire you? 

I owe my poet lineage to Kim Addonizio, D.A. Powell, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Bruce Snider. Currently, I am inspired by the writing of Camonghne Felix, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Hanif Abdurraqib, Fatimah Asghar, and Angel Nafis.

Name a book or performance that fundamentally affected you. 

Jamaal May’s reading of Macrophobia: A Fear of Waiting at AWP 2014 in Seattle. 

Want to learn more about Sage? By supporting her work on Patreon, you can gain exclusive access to poems, book reviews and more. RSVP on Facebook to our LitCrawl event to get the latest.