Join us at the 2025 Lit Crawl, part of San Francisco’s Literary Festival: Litquake!

Unheard Onstage: Black writers on opportunity and audience
OCTOBER 25, 2025 | 5 – 6PM | Medicine for Nightmares (3036 24th Street, SF)
Whose voices go unheard? Substrate’s Julius Rea presents a live interview with wildly talented writers D. Scot Miller and Shawn Taylor. Perhaps you’ve never heard of these Black writers? EXACTLY. (But perhaps you have; they do make themselves heard.) These Bay Area writers struggle against the lack of writing outlets, but also against gatekeeping, discrimination, and financial problems. Onstage, they examine what, exactly, prevents them from producing work. Specifically, the reasons they’ve been unable to work with Substrate, an online magazine formed with the express intention of creating a new platform for arts writers. Miller and Taylor read from unpublished work, and describe writing they’d like to produce. “As a Black writer who hasn’t been able to find work in my chosen field for years, my 90s dream has been destroyed by an industry … [deciding] my past achievements are not good indicators of future performance.” -D. Scot Miller
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