Kate Baer hates small talk.

She doesn’t want to talk about her kids’ soccer schedules or what she’s going to make for dinner. She wants to talk about your marriage. Your sexuality. Your depression. The things we’re trained to hide, soften, or pass over. That instinct has always guided her work: a refusal to stay on the surface of her own life or anyone else’s.

At the heart of Kate Baer’s poetry is a radical question:

What happens when you stop protecting the version of yourself you think you’re supposed to be?

Her work explores what it means to sacrifice the facade-of the “good” woman, the “acceptable” writer, the curated self-in order to tell the truth. Again and again, she chooses vulnerability over polish, honesty over likability, presence over safety. Not because it’s comfortable, but because the alternative is missing your own life.

By putting her most personal truths into the world, Kate has found something unexpected: reception instead of rejection. Connection instead of silence. Being seen has encouraged her to go further, deeper, and truer-and her audience has followed.

In our 90 minutes together, Kate will talk about:

• Why vulnerability on the page is not optional if you want a real life
• The cost of hiding behind a carefully managed self
• Writing as a way of telling the truth about who you are
• What it means to allow yourself to be seen-as a writer and as a person

We’ll also write together.

Using Kate’s poems as a starting point, we’ll be invited into our own acts of truth-telling-writing that risks exposure, abandons niceness, and experiments with honesty on the page. This is writing not as performance, but as presence.

Come ready to skip the small talk.

Come ready to tell the truth.

Come ready to be seen.

I’M EXCITED TO BE PARTNERING WITH CHAPTER 510, A NONPROFIT GROUP IN OAKLAND SERVING BLACK, BROWN, AND QUEER KIDS, AGES 7-18.

Chapter 510 is a writing, bookmaking & publishing center that wants every young person in Oakland to write with confidence and joy. Chapter 510 believes that writing is an act of liberation, and that young people transform themselves and their communities when they write and get published, succeeding in work, school, and life.

A portion of the proceeds from this event will go to supporting their free creative writing programs for black, brown, and queer youth.