Colossus: Home addresses the devastating housing crisis we face as a community and country. Inspired by the work of the brave women at Moms4Housing, this theme was born out of frustration about the rising number of unhoused people in the Bay Area. We put out a call for poetry, prose, and visual art in response to the prompt “home". Over 40 poets from the SF Bay Area contributed to this anthology.
"This poetic tribute to the courageous Oakland Moms, who challenged power and housed their families in a vacant home, exudes passion for social justice and direct action in the birthplace of the Black Panther Party. It reverberates throughout the world of housing deprivation, especially in the richest country, the USA."
-Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.
"In this volume dedicated to the fight for housing justice and to the Black women leading the movement for change, you will read vital accounts of lives and times and of the Bay Area’s living contradiction: The people who built the region and make it what it is can no longer afford to live here. The poets who answered the call to lend their words in support of Moms4Housing are as unique as they are united: From the fire of Dee Allen, E.K. Keith and Tony Aldarondo to the air of Maw Shein Win and Kim Shuck, all of the writing collected here flows through a community in service to advancing its cause, whether poetry or a place to call home. These activists and poets and poet-activists are mighty, reclaiming houses and entire blocks with their words. Their book is your book, a cornerstone in imagining a future that includes housing for everyone."
-Denise Sullivan, editor, Your Golden Sun Still Shines: San Francisco Personal Histories & Small Fictions
"What is home? Where is home. Do we know home by its sounds and smells, its colors and rhythms, its people, some familiar and some strangers? Is it a place or an idea? And if you find the streets are the place of your roofless home, a home without safety, do you still call it home? With poems and exquisite photographs and paintings this anthology gracefully brings myriad skilled poet voices together to examine and reveal home in its many dimensions. Some poems are songs, others are chants, some scream and some whisper, some are laughter and memory, others history and tears, but all ask you to look, to hear, to question and to acknowledge home and homelessness. You may find new favorite poems here, fresh insights, difficult truths and hard-fought spiritual depths, but for sure this anthology will give you energy to struggle for homes for all as you appreciate the magic and power of its poetry."
-Devorah Major, San Francisco’s third Poet Laureate, an award winning poet, writer, performer, and editor. Her latest book is califia’s daughter.
"This anthology is a staggering, urgent accomplishment. In the process of bringing together an inclusive community of poets, artists and authors to respond to the devastating housing crisis facing the San Francisco Bay Area (and urban areas around the world), editors Karla Brundage and Sara Biel have created a meditation on the physical and psychic nature of home itself. Inspired by the civil disobedience of the Moms4Housing Collective, the blend of poetry, original artwork, and testimony from unhoused individuals will itself inspire readers, filling in the gaps news stories leave behind. Organized into five evocatively-named sections (Home*Body, Home*Made, Home*Town, Home*Land, Home*Coming), the collection feels, as the introduction states, like “its own kind of home.” Essential reading as timeless as it is timely."
-Faith Adiele, PEN award-winning author, professor and co-founder, VONA Travel Writing, MoAD African Book Club and BIPOC Writing Party
All the proceeds from sales of Colossus: Home will go to Moms4Housing.
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