City Lights Booksellers & Publishers hosts El Martillo Press Reading

City Lights Booksellers & Publishers hosts El Martillo Press for a reading with Tshaka Campbell, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Paul S. Flores, Margaret Elysia Garcia, and Briana Muñoz.

City Lights Bookstore

261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco, CA 94133

Hosted by El Martillo Press cofounders Matt Sedillo and David A. Romero

Founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin, City Lights is one of the few truly great independent bookstores in the United States, a place where booklovers from across the country and around the world come to browse, read, and just soak in the ambiance of alternative culture’s only “Literary Landmark.” Although it has been more than sixty years since tour buses with passengers eager to sight “beatniks” began pulling up in front of City Lights, the Beats’ legacy of anti-authoritarian politics and unconstrained intellectual curiosity continues to be a strong influence in the store, most evident in the selection of titles.

Tshaka Campbell

Poet Laureate Emeritus, Santa Clara County. Originally from London England, Tshaka Campbell was raised on his father’s teachings of solidarity and brought up on orators the likes of Garvey's ‘Pan-Africanism’ to William Churchill, as such, he adopted his father’s intense love of language. 

Lorna Dee Cervantes

One of the major voices in Chicana literature, poet Lorna Dee Cervantes’s writing evokes and explores cultural difference — between Mexican, Anglo, Native American, and African American lives — as well as the divides of gender and economics. Born in San Francisco in 1954 to Mexican and Native American ancestry, Cervantes was discouraged from speaking Spanish at home in an attempt to protect her from the racism prevalent at that time; this loss of language and subsequent inability to fully identify with her heritage fueled her later poetry.

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Paul S. Flores

American Book Award winner Paul S. Flores is one of the most influential Latino performance artists in the country and a nationally respected arts educator. He creates plays, oral narratives, and spoken word about transnationality and citizenship that spur and support societal movements that lead to change.

Margaret Elysia Garcia

Macondo fellow Margaret Elysia Garcia is the author of Graft, a collection of Chicanx noir short stories set in Southern California and published by Tolsun Press, the daughterland published by El Martillo Press, and the poetry chapbook Burn Scars published by the Lit Kit Collective. She’s the co-editor of Red Flag Warning: Northern Californians Living with Fire, published by HeyDay books in 2025.  

Briana Muñoz

Briana Muñoz is the author of Loose Lips (Prickly Pear Publishing, 2019) and Everything is Returned to the Soil (FlowerSong Press, 2021) and the forthcoming Matriarchy (El Martillo Press, 2025).

El Martillo Press

Founded by Matt Sedillo and David A. Romero, El Martillo Press publishes writers whose pens strike the page with clear intent; words with purpose to pry apart assumed norms and to hammer away at injustice. El Martillo Press proactively publishes writers looking to pound the pavement to promote their work and the work of their fellow pressmates. El Martillo is the builder of bridges and the destroyer of walls.