Kimberly DaSilva, Jacqueline Francis, and Patricia Powell are queer, award-winning San Francisco Bay Area fiction writers. They explore themes of migration, ghosts, and family ties that resonate in the experiences of people of the Caribbean and its diaspora. In the spirit of the Jamaican expression, "talk and taste your tongue" (think before you speak), DaSilva, Francis, and Powell will read excerpts from their fiction and discuss their influences with the audience.

‍Kimberly DaSilva is a novelist who has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, an American Library Association Stonewall Book Award, and her fiction has been recognized  Ebony Magazine. Her work has been described as "impressive" by Kirkus and "elegant" by The Advocate. She is the recipient of a San Francisco Arts Commission grant and an alumni of the Voices of Our Nation Arts (VONA) Foundation Workshop.

‍Jacqueline Francis is a recipient of a San Francisco Individual Artist Commission (2017-18): she is working on a collection of short stories about the bicultural experiences of contemporary Afro-Caribbean immigrants to the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Francis is the author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America. She is Associate Professor and Chair of the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts (San Francisco).

‍Patricia Powell is the author of Me Dying Trial, A Small Gathering of Bones, The Pagoda and The Fullness of Everything. She is the recipient of a PEN Award, a Lila-Wallace Readers Digest Writers Award,  and a Ferro Grumley Award for LGBT fiction among others. A graduate of the MFA program at Brown University, Powell is a professor of literature and creative writing at Mills College.

This program is supported by the San Francisco Arts Commission.

above image: Frank Bowling, Polish Rebecca, 1971. Acrylic on canvas painting