Geneffa Jahan is proud to read from her debut collection, Spilling the Chai: Poems about Family and Food, at Satori Arts on April 4, 2025 as the featured reader for First Friday in April—National Poetry Month.  

 

She will read, sell, and sign her book at The Diversity Center of Santa Cruz on May 11th with a focus on Mother’s Day for Queer people and allies. This will begin with a poetry workshop at 2:00 pm followed by an Open Mic, reading and signing from 3:00 – 4:00 pm. She returns to Satori Arts as the InterActe Featured Reader on July 15th. 

 

On July 27th, poet Ignatius Valentine Aloysius will host Geneffa for his popular Sunday Salon reading series in Chicago. He says of her volume, “Here is memory sizzling like mustard and cumin seeds in hot oil, offering up an immigrant family's unique meals and its intimate, and difficult, histories. Spilling the Chai will warm your soul and make you consider all that your heart keeps and releases in a lifetime.”

 

Former Santa Cruz Poet Laureate, David Allen Sullivan adds, Spilling the Chai is rich and aromatic, with a sharp bite. It’s about ritual and realization, about places where everything’s “measured by hand and learned by heart.” In these spaces, the multi-lingual, displaced speaker has “learned to cope with [her] mouth a cramped cave. . . .” With linguistic flare, and a sure sense of story, these poems leave a haunting—and haunted—aftertaste. Despite hardships endured, these are offerings of love. Take. Eat. Khuda Hafiz!