Name: Lift Every Voice: A Festival Finale in Verse
Start: 2026-10-23T19:00:00-0700
End: 2026-10-23T20:30:00-0700

Lift Every Voice: A Festival Finale in Verse

Friday October 23, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT

First Presbyterian Church of Oakland Fellowship Hall

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Pay what you can to guarantee a seat; FREE to walk ups space depending

Coming to us from Chicago, Phillip B. Williams brings us his newest collection Lift Every Voice, a staggering tribute to personal and collective evolutions, a vital chorus that answers only to God, community, and the empowered self. What better way to ground us on the penultimate night of Litquake 2026? Litquake invites you in alongside poets Fatimah Asghar, Stephanie Horvath, D.A. Powell, D.M. Spratley, and Phillip B. Williams to bear witness to the beauty and resiliency of our words and community.. Hosted by Litquake’s Artistic Director Graham Todd. Doors at 6:30pm.

Moderators

Graham Todd

Graham Todd is a fiction writer and the Artistic Director of Litquake, San Francisco's Literary Festival. He studied literature and religion at Stanford and received his MFA from Bowling Green. His writing has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Southampton Review, Notre Dame Review, Epiphany... Read More →

Speakers

Phillip B. Williams

Phillip B. Williams is the author of the novel Ours and three collections of poetry: Thief in the Interior, which was the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Lambda Literary Award, Mutiny, which was a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the winner of a... Read More →

D. M. Spratley

D. M. Spratley is a writer from the American South. A Wallace Stegner Fellow, Cave Canem Fellow, North Carolina Arts Council Fellow, and William C. Friday Fellow for Human Relations, she graduated from the MFA program at Hollins University and studied comparative literature and creative... Read More →

D A Powell

D A Powell is the author of numerous collections of poetry including Low Hanging Fruit (Foundlings Press, 2022) and Atlas T (Rescue Press, 2020). His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, and the John Updike Award from the American... Read More →

Fatimah Asghar

Fatimah Asghar, author of If They Come for Us, is a poet, filmmaker, educator, and performer. They are the writer and co-creator of Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series that highlights friendships between women of color. They also were a co-producer on Ms. Marvel for Disney... Read More →

Stephanie Horvath

Stephanie Horvath is the author of Field of Vision, winner of the 2025 National Poetry Series, published by Penguin in October 2026. She lives in Northern California and teaches at Stanford University.

Friday October 23, 2026 7:00pm - 8:30pm PDT
First Presbyterian Church of Oakland Fellowship Hall 2619 Broadway, Oakland

Poetry, Pay What You Can

City Oakland

Litquake 2026