Vanessa Huang is a poet, writer, filmmaker, cellist, and community organizer whose practice feeds the resilience and embodiment of people, campaigns, and movement building from the margins. Vanessa's work draws on a history of collaboration across the anti-prison, gender liberation, immigrant rights, and anti-violence movements. Vanessa was a finalist for Poets & Writers’ 2010 California Writers Exchange for her poetry manuscript, quiet of chorus, which has been described as a project that “lifts up the often muffled legacies of resistance to genocide in contemporary life” and home to “lifeworlds that yearn for freedom and wholeness, and help enliven the path forward.” Vanessa is a Macondo and Kundiman Fellow.

Born and raised in the Bay Area to Chinese immigrants from Taipei, Vanessa spent her childhood Saturdays in Oakland's Chinatown learning Mandarin, her teenage Sundays at Laney College rehearsing with the Oakland Youth Orchestra, and as a high schooler interned and canvassed with her district representative Barbara Lee. Vanessa lives in Oakland where she writes, performs, teaches, and consults with social justice organizations.

ON OAKLAND

"Since I was born, Oakland and its neighbors been a place for me to collect my words, often in silence, in wait to learn and know. My practice of poetry in turn is called by the quiet bodyprayer, unsounded and unpracticed words -- the seemingly missing. Within and across our birth and chosen families here in Oakland -- by touch or by heart, memorybreak -- these truths and their legacies of resistance are undeniable. And they are all around us."

FUTURE PROJECTS

Vanessa's manuscript quiet of chorus is in progress. She recently engaged by a targeted group of Oakland community organizers, activists, artists, friends, family in an intimate reading and response gathering at East Side Arts Alliance to widen the circle of readers as she develops the collection as a movement offering.  She will also be heading to the prestigious Kundiman and Macondo writers retreats this summer.

POEMS BY VANESSA HUANG

Manifesto

We believe in home     all home all beautiful     home enough bellies breathe & sigh    

enough skin rest dance free     enough courage carry all life     this a home no landlord

tenant bank imagine     no passport jail shelter claim     no developer gift no reparation

furnish     this home free a bodycrossing & shame     free a memorybreak     no shame

all beautiful     this home pray for lost & stolen     home now free a traveling fence

finger & sky breaking open     free enough many home many body home & whole

together     home safe & full spirit prayer     bodyprayer full desire     home wider song

& cookin     wider shape a wood brick & stone     home wider shapes weave together    

full & wide enough spirit return to body     enough whole body each body heartbody

earthbody holy beautiful     holy so holy body homeless turn home again

We want home    all home all beautiful     home alive so alive heartbrave thunder shake

out a hiding     so holy beautiful & so holy brave every body home & every body free    

This poem was first printed by Street Spirit and has been read in Oakland at Lake Merritt during a vigil in honor of Jorge Steven López Mercado and Jason Mattison Jr, two queer and gender non-conforming youth of color murdered in 2009, and at the Islamic Cultural Center alongside other Bay Area poets gathering to raise funds for Haiti and Chile.

The poem’s original inspiration was in a San Francisco-based TGI Justice Project visit to NYC with the Welfare Warriors, TransJustice, and Sylvia Rivera Law Project amidst a campaign and broader organizing to end transphobic discrimination and violence for folks accessing welfare and in the shelter system.

whispersound for lost and stolen

after Assata Shakur and Marilyn Buck

Where is the monthly snow, handwritings of yesteryear?

Where do the contraband folds of letter pray?

Where have they moved the fields of killing?

Where have they hidden our angels of embalmment, ceremony of the dead?

Where is the voice each ash and bone, song of the kidnapped ovary?

Where is the thankful one, her memory of moon’s old laugh line?

Where is exile’s red wild poppy, its blade of grass, its quaking bone?

This poem was written on a postcard and mailed from Oakland to Pittsburgh during the April 2010 poem a day challenge.

Angel Island

No one ever mentions

the curator’s selective attentions

or the officer’s extravagant manner,

barracks of my soundless hum:

the columned sleep,

each needless strange suicide,

all the luckless Gold

Mountain compatriots of my anchored shipland.

This poem was written on a postcard and mailed from Oakland to San Francisco during the April 2010 poem a day challenge.