"In the San Francisco Bay Area, we are guests on the unceded ancestral homelands of the Ohlone, Miwok, and other original stewards of this land. In gratitude and solidarity, we seek to restore balance and harmony within ourselves, with each other, and in community. The vitality of the San Francisco Bay Area arises from its diversity. Fully 60% of its residents are people of color. We have long been overlooked, but we have always made essential contributions to Bay Area to life and culture ... This book includes poetry, prose and visual art from 130 contributors -- Black, Brown, Indigenous, People of Color and a few White Allies. We range from poets laureates and PhDs to high-school students and closet writers; from fire commissioners to the formerly unhoused. Our work is not always polished, but it arises from the lived experience of grapphling with real issues of the day. Our sense of community (or the ache of erosion) and our roots in Native America, Africa, Asia, Latin American, the Middle East, and Europe give us strenght to face uncomfortable realities without blinging. We may write in the vernacular, or English may be our second or third language. If our rhythms are unfamiliar, ask yourself why -- is our work inflected by other tongues and vernaculars, rusty from disuse, scattered by stress or trauma, struggling out silence, or hastily scribbled on borrowed time? Old ways are dissolving, and change is in the air. BIPOC arts and activism have been here all along. Now we are stepping into the light."--Page v