Writers Tureeda Mikell and Ayodele “WordSlanger” Nzinga honor the full moon with poetry. Live painter Adrian Arias paints his vision of the words, the night, and the moon. Bruja Michelle Ruiz Keil draws on the moon’s power, offering tarot readings to help us imagine and manifest the future.

Tureeda Mikell, author and Story Medicine Woman, is an award-winning poet recently named MoAD 2022 poet in residence. She has published seventy-three California Poets in the Schools at-risk student anthologies since 1989. Her full-length collection, Synchronicity, The Oracle of Sun Medicine, was released in February 2020.

Ayodele “WordSlanger” Nzinga is the inaugural poet laureate of Oakland. She is the founder of Lower Bottom Playaz, Inc, Oakland’s oldest North American African theater company. She is the producing artistic director of BAMBDFEST International Biennial and a YBCA 10 Fellow. She is the author of Performing Literacy: A Narrative Inquiry into Performance Pedagogy, The Horse Eaters, SorrowLand Oracle, and Incandescent.

Adrian Arias is a proud descendant of the Mochica culture of ancient Peru. Arias is one of the founders and creators of MAPP (Mission Arts Performance Project) and a creator of festivals in the San Francisco Bay Area such as VideoFest, Luna Negra, and ILLUSION shows. He is the creator of murals in the Bay Area such as River to the Sky in the Tenderloin, Indigenous Woman in the Magic Theater, and Sacred Hummingbird Stories in the new Google facility, among others.

Michelle Ruiz Keil is a playwright, tarot reader, and author of the novels All of Us with Wings and Summer in the City of Roses, ;a finalist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. Her most recent short stories are published in The Buckman Journal and the anthology Dispatches from Anarres.