The Patron Saints of Influence Summer Reading + Open Mic takes place on Sunday, June 15 at 5PM at Shady Oak Barrel House in Santa Rosa. We will be celebrating Pride Month and honoring Oscar Wilde this Father’s Day with featured readers Carol Dorf, Chad Koch, and Lauren Parker.
About the event:
Patron Saints is a literary series & open mic in Santa Rosa, CA hosted by Sarah Broderick and Gaia Patience Veenis with featured readings by published writers sharing their own work and space for writers from all backgrounds to share their work aloud. For each event, we also select a dearly departed literary “influencer” to honor and get inspired. You are welcome to share poetry, stories, essays, lyrics, memoir, or any sort of written work at our open mic. We just ask that you keep it under 5 minutes and, if you’re not sharing work inspired by our latest influencer, feel free to tell us at least one writer or artist who did influence you!
Arrive early (by 4:30PM) to sign up for the open mic, do some spontaneous writing if you’d like, and get your free gift. If you would like a writing prompt and something to read by Oscar Wilde ahead of time, or want to learn more about this event and the literary series, head to https://tinyurl.com/Patron-Saints-form or find us on Instagram @patron.saints.sr.
About the featured readers:
Carol Dorf has received fellowships from the Hawthornden Foundation, Zoeglossia, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, as well as “Best of the Net” and “Best Microfiction” nominations. Their writing appears on the Poetry Foundation website, in several chapbooks, and in journals that include “Pleiades,” “About Place,” “Cutthroat,” “Braving the Body,” “The Mom Egg,” “American Stories,” “Five South,” “YesYesPoetry,” and “Scientific American.” Founding poetry editor of Talking Writing, they taught math and writing in Berkeley USD, as well as at museums and conferences.
Chad Koch is the co-founder of Foglifter Press, the award-winning queer literary journal and press. He has an MFA from San Francisco State University, where he received the Miriam Ylvisaker Fellowship for Fiction. He was a Lambda Literary fellow and San Francisco Writers’ Grotto fellow and his work has appeared in The North American Review, Madison Review, ElevenEleven, Midwestern Gothic, Duende, Into the Void, and others. His work has also been nominated for multiple Pushcart Awards and he is the winner of the Leo Litwak Award for outstanding Fiction from Transfer Magazine.
Lauren Parker is a fourth generation female breadwinner descended from male charlatans, and thus has grown up to become a very educated liar. She is a writer, zine maker, and visual artist and has written for the Toast, Strange Horizons, The Racket, Catapult, and Autostraddle. Her work focuses on the intersection of class, queerness, and the occult, and she teaches workshops on poetry and metaphysics. She’s the author of the poetry collection We Are Now the Thing in the Woods (Bottlecap Press, 2023), Dark Way Down (Animal Heart Press, 2025), and Spells for Success (Simon Element, 2025). She has a newsletter, Do You Want to Do Some Witchcraft?
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Shady Oak Barrel House
420 First St
- Santa Rosa