About the Anthology

Giving Voice 2026: LaborFest Writers Anthology is the second collection from LaborFest Writers, the San Francisco writing group that has been meeting continuously since 2005. 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. Our first anthology gathered work from the group’s early years, 2006 to 2018. This new volume reflects a writers’ group that has grown in depth and range over two decades — sharpened by craft, by conversation, and by a shared commitment to putting the experience of working people at the center of literary life.

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.

Among the highlights

• A 34-year newspaper copy editor recalls the union that saved his job — twice — and watches the entire skilled craft of newspaper printing become an endangered species
• A woman on a crowded streetcar finds her moment to lift a harasser’s hand into the air and name what he has done
• A graveyard-shift mentor at a Cream of Wheat factory, son of an IWW man, extends break after break to teach his young co-workers stories of penny auctions, horse-manure raids on Republican picnics, and what really happened on merchant ships
• Grace before meals is addressed not to God but to the migrants whose sweat makes our food possible
• A coal miner’s great-granddaughter reconstructs the lives of women who gave birth in tents during long strikes, in a county with the highest infant death rate in the United States

Poems included range from Greek roadsides to the Paris Peace Accords table, from the Hunters Point cafeteria workers of 1946 to the San Francisco Living Wage campaign, from a bull rider in traction finding peace on the back of an animal that wants to throw him — and what that tells us about this political moment — to a childhood game of Red Rover interrupted by a grandmother’s bigotry and a mother’s quiet courage.

What connects the writers is not style or subject but the refusal to look away — from work, from struggle, from the texture of lives the mainstream literary world tends not to see. The anthology invites you to decide what you make of it.

Featured Writers

• Nellie Wong
• Barbara Ruth Saunders
• Robert Eugene Rubino
• Alice Elizabeth Rogoff
• Jerry Path
• Susan Ford
• Margaret Cooley
• Keith David Cooley

First Anthology — Published 2018

Contributors

• Margaret Cooley
• Keith David Cooley
• Alice Elizabeth Rogoff
• Jerry Path
• Nellie Wong
• Phyllis Holliday
• Adele Kearney