Show Us Your Papers Anthology Reading, online

“Show Us Your Papers speaks to a crisis of identity and belonging, to an increasing sense of vulnerability amid rapid changes in the USA. While corporations wait to assign us a number, here are 81 poets who demand full identities, richer than those allowed by documents of every sort. Here are poems of immigration and concentration camps, of refugees and wills, marriage and divorce, of lost correspondence and found parents, of identity theft and medical charts. In an era where the databases multiply, where politicians and tech companies sort us into endless categories, identifying documents serve as thumbtacks. They freeze the dancing, lurching, rising and falling experience of our lives. The disconnect between our documents and our identities is inherent, reductive, frustrating, and, too often, dangerous. Yet we cannot live without them. In this anthology 81 poets offer a richer sense of our lives and histories—richer than any “official paper” allows. These lyric and narrative forms demand that readers recognize our full identities: personal, familial, national, and historical.”

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Joan Bauer

Joan E. Bauer is the author of The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008). With Judith Robinson and Sankar Roy, she co-edited the anthology, Only the Sea Keeps: Poetry of the Tsunami (Bayeux Arts and Rupa & Co, 2005). In 2007, she won the Earle Birney Poetry Prize from Prism International. For some years, she was a teacher and counselor and now divides her time between Venice, CA and Pittsburgh , PA where for ten years she has has co-hosted and curated the Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series. Her second full-length book of poetry, The Camera Artist, is forthcoming from Turning Point in 2021.

Sabina Khan-Ibarra

Sabina Khan-Ibarra is a Pashtun-American writer. She has an MFA from SFSU with work published in Panoplyzine, Anomaly Literary Journal, Ghost Heart Literary Journal, iO Literary, Faithfully Feminist, and Show us Your Papers Anthology. Sabina is a recipient of the Brainard Fellowship, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Wilmer award, and more. She is currently working on her novel, “The Poppy Flower” and her Poetry Collection, “Crossing Oceans and Climbing Mountains”. She’s on the Board of Directors for MuslimARC, where she works as a Communications Director and Managing Editor. Sabina lives in Half Moon Bay, California with her husband, two kids, six chickens, and four rabbits.

Steve Ramirez

Steve Ramirez hosts the weekly reading series, Two Idiots Peddling Poetry.   A former member of the Laguna Beach Slam Team, he’s also a former organizer of the Orange County Poetry Festival and former member of the Five Penny Poets in Huntington Beach.   Publication credits include Pearl, The Comstock Review, Crate, Aim for the Head (a zombie anthology) and & MultiVerse (a superhero anthology).