The Town: An Anthology of Oakland Poets

J. K. Fowler founded Nomadic Press, a national award-winning community-focused non-profit publisher that was in operation from 2011-2023 and headquartered in Oakland, California. In 2022, he co-founded Bundo Cafebrería in Xalapa, Mexico, and in 2023 he launched the Huerto de Osos Perezosos retreat space in Mexico for creative souls. In 2023, he also launched the Public Planter Publishing Podcast and Consultancy and Nomadic Foundation, which builds off of the legacy work of Nomadic Press. He believes deeply in the transformational power of self-determination, mycelial curiosity and inquiry, justice, and the act of intentionally weaving (and tending to) community.

Ayodele Nzinga is a multi-hyphenated artist; a brilliant actress, producing director, playwright, poet, dramaturg, performance consultant, educator, and community advocate. She is the director of the Lower Bottom Playaz, Inc., Oakland's oldest North American African Theater Company and founder of Lower Bottom Playaz Summer Theater Day Camp. She is co-founder of Janga's House a Black Women Arts collective and a founding member of BlacSpace Collective. Nzinga is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Oakland CA. She is the author of Performing Literacy: A Narrative Inquiry into Performance Pedagogy in a Marginalized Community (Lambert Academic Publishing, 2015), THE HORSE EATERS (Nomadic Press, 2017), SORROWLAND ORACLE (Nomadic Press, 2022), and Incandescent (Not a Pipe Publishing, 2021) and her work can be found in numerous journals and anthologies. Nzinga, a cultural anchor, is part theoretician and part partitioner. She describes herself as a cultural architect invested in creating structures for culture making.