Kim Shuck

Kim Shuck has been selected as San Francisco’s seventh poet laureate, and will take the reins from Alejandro Murguia in early August. Her four published collections (three books and one chapbook) are, in order Smuggling Cherokee, Rabbit Stories (proses), Sidewalk Ndn and Clouds Running; she considers the chapbook Sidewalk Ndn her best collection so far.
 
Kim’s first publication was in a Canadian First Nations magazine The En’owken Journal. Her first reading organizing was for the Native American Cultural Center in SF, which Bird and Beckett is pleased to have supported by hosting some of the readings. Subsequently, she has received various awards and accolades and has done much teaching. Kim was on the board of directors for California Poets in the Schools in the early 2000s, received a Diane Decorah award, various mentor awards, a local hero award from KQED and a Mary Tall Mountain Award. She has been much nominated for a Pushcart, has co-edited two anthologies of poetry for PEN Oakland, has an infrequent online journal called Rabbit and Rose which doesn’t include her own work. She teaches poetry in a number of places including as a classroom volunteer in SF Unified and as unranked faculty at CCA. She has read her work LitQuake, Flor y Canto, Petaluma Poetry Walk, Beast Crawl, Watershed, the Beatnik Shindig and other major gatherings. Her work can be found in anthologies including The World is One Place (ed. Glancy and Rodriquez), Imaniman (ed. Silva and Vera), Red Indian Road West (ed. Schweigman and Day) and others forthcoming. She has also curated panels of Native poetry on permanent display on Alcatraz in commemoration of the occupations there.
 
We are pleased and proud to welcome Kim to Bird & Beckett for this reading at the outset of her two-year term as Poet Laureate of San Francisco.