Adobe Books & Arts Cooperative
3130 24th Street, San Francisco
Wednesday, July 29, 2026 • 7:00-8:30pm
LaborFest Writers are proud to announce the publication of Giving Voice 2026: LaborFest Writers Anthology — our latest collection of writing: fiction, polemic, memoir and poetry tracing the lives and struggles of working people across generations and geographies.
Giving Voice 2026 honors Nellie Wong (1934-2026) — poet, activist, and beloved member of LaborFest Writers. Her voice is in its pages.
Giving Voice 2026 is available now and features: Nellie Wong • Barbara Ruth Saunders • Susan Ford • Robert Eugene Rubino • Alice Elizabeth Rogoff • Jerry Path • Margaret Cooley • Keith David Cooley.
The corporate-controlled media amplifies the voices of the powerful and diminishes the voices of working people. LaborFest Writers was founded to change that.
LaborFest Writers grew out of a single afternoon in July 2005 — a writing workshop during LaborFest at the Exit Theatre in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, led by radical writer Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Twenty years later, the group still meets — now weekly on Zoom, since the pandemic. We are rabble-rousers, activists, leftist radicals, union members, immigrants, native-born and plain old trouble-makers – outside the literary mainstream and committed to staying there.
Join us on Wednesday, July 29th, from 7 to 8:30 pm at Adobe Books & Arts Cooperative, 3130 24th Street, San Francisco, as featured writers from the anthology read from their work with a tribute to Nellie Wong. All are welcome.
www.laborfestwriters.org
Giving Voice 2026: LaborFest Writers Anthology
The second collection from LaborFest Writers — fiction, polemic, memoir, and poetry by eight writers tracing the lives and struggles of working people across generations and geographies.
The anthology opens with a tribute to Nellie Wong, the poet and activist who joined LaborFest Writers in 2008 and passed away in January 2026. Her section — one of the largest in the book — includes a multi-part monologue tracing a Chinese-American woman’s life from childhood to middle age in the vivid, irreverent voice she made her own, and a full play in which a secretary named Ms. Security-Runs-a-Risk takes on her corporate interrogator in a crackling battle over language, power, and what it means to be American. Several of the poems were written in the final months of her life.
The anthology is astonishing in its variety: across eight writers it includes memoir essays, oral history, fiction, prose-poetry, haiku, duplex, ode, and political satire — often in the same writer’s hands.