Leslie Simon, John Isles, Tara Dorabji and Linda Michel-Cassidy will read poetry and fiction at the next Reading & Meeting.
Leslie Simon grew up on the South Side of Chicago. She founded the Poetry for the People class and performing collective at City College of San Francisco in 1975. She also founded Project SURVIVE, the college’s sexual violence prevention education program.She has published several poetry collections, including Collisions and Transformations, High Desire, and Jazz/ is for white girls, too. She co-edited, with Jan Johnson Drantell, an oral history collection, A Music I No Longer Heard: The Early Death of a Parent.She will read from The Divine Comic, a novel about two Jewish sisters, one Zionist and one not.
Tara Dorabji is the author of Call Her Freedom, winner of the Simon & Schuster Books Like Us first novel contest. She is the daughter of Parsi-Indian and German-Italian migrants. Her documentary film series on human rights defenders in Kashmir won awards at over a dozen film festivals throughout Asia and the USA. Tara's publications include Al Jazeera, The Chicago Quarterly, People.com, Huizache, and acclaimed anthologies: Good Girls Marry Doctors &All the Women in My Family Sing. She lives in Northern California with her twins and rabbit.
John Isles teaches at City College of San Francisco and is the author of Ark and Inverse Sky (University of Iowa's Kuhl House Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a wide variety of magazines, including, American Letters & Commentary, American Literary Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, Denver Quarterly, Failbetter, Hotel Amerika, Posit, and Zyzzyva. He is the recipient of NEA Grant for Poetry and winner of a Los Angeles Review Poetry Prize.
Linda Michel-Cassidy’s story collection, When We Were Hardcore, from EastOver Press, was released in February 2025. Her writing has appeared in Rattle, The Rumpus, Electric Lit, Tahoma Review, December, Catamaran, and elsewhere. She is senior reviews and hybrid/collaboration editor at Tupelo Quarterly, edits the Marin Poetry Center anthologies, and works for the MFA in writing program at VCFA at CalArts. She holds MFAs from VCFA (poetry), Bennington (fiction), and California College of the Arts (visual arts). Michel-Cassidy lives on a houseboat in Sausalito, and is a novice open-water swimmer. lmichelcassidy.com