Picked for you from the audio garden

s4e22
July 2, 2026

Welcome to the Listen & Be Heard Hour Summer Remix Season! Summer Remix 3 is a special blend picked from the audio garden and remixed by Hernán Ramiro for your listening pleasure.

Featured in the remix: Martha Cinader, Shizue Siegel, Shirley Ancheta, Mosab Abu Toha and Tony Robles. An exclusive live recording at the Blue Note of Principals of Freedom by Jay Rodriguez Sierra.

[link to transcript]

Catch the 24/7 broadcast and continuous live streams directly at wlbh.org.

Missed the earlier garden blends? Listen to Summer Remix 1 and Summer Remix 2.

Shizue Seigel is a third-generation Japanese American writer, visual artist and community activist who explores complex intersections of history, culture and spirituality through prose, poetry and visual art.

Tony Robles, “The People’s Poet” was born in San Francisco and is the nephew of Filipino-American poet, historian and social justice activist Al Robles. He was a shortlist nominee for poet laureate of San Francisco in 2017 and the recipient of the San Francisco Art Commission individual literary artist grant in 2018. His two books of poetry and short stories, Cool Don’t Live Here No More – A letter to San Francisco and Fingerprints of a Hunger Strike (both published by Ithuriel’s Spear Press) take on the issues of eviction, gentrification and police violence in communities of color. He is…

Martha Cinader is a poet and author living in Harlem, NY. Her young adult novel, Marq and the Queen Fish, is forthcoming in 2026 from Atmosphere Press. Cinader is the founder and Director of the Listen & Be Heard Network, where she hosts and produces The Listen & Be Heard Hour, and Beyond Borders, both non-commercial podcasts and syndicated radio shows on the Pacifica Affiliate Network. 

MOSAB ABU TOHA is a Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist from Gaza. His first collection of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and won the Palestine Book Award, the American Book Award, and the Walcott Poetry Prize. Abu Toha is also the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award for his “Letter from Gaza” columns for The New Yorker.

Laura Lengnick, a renowned soil scientist, has three decades of experience in sustainability in U.S. agriculture. She has received national recognition for her work, including a USDA Honor Award. As the founder of Cultivating Resilience, she collaborates on climate resilience projects and authored the influential book, Resilient Agriculture.

“This collection is based on my experiences and observations as someone who witnessed Hurricane Helene and its impact on the community—particularly my mobile home community in Hendersonville,”

“A powerful, capacious, and profound” (Ocean Vuong) new collection of poems about life in Gaza by an award-winning Palestinian poet. Barely thirty years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current siege of Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed and destroyed his house, pulverizing a library he had painstakingly built for community use, he and his family fled for their safety. Not for the first time in their lives.

In this remarkable collection, Tony Robles transforms a bright-lit warehouse into a psychic landscape to illuminate one man’s efforts to reassemble a broken life. Where the Warehouse Things Are gives the satisfaction of a book of poetry as well as a novelistic sense of a place and its inhabitants fully rendered. — Ron Rash, author ofThe Caretaker

What does it take to develop and sustain a career in creative arts. Twenty-two San Francisco Bay Area writers and artists of color trace their journeys as creative activists. They draw from legacies and challenges of roots in Native America, Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Muslim world. Their lived experience as creative changemakers brings authencity and humanity to today’s pressing issues—from the pandemic to racism, immigration, social justice, gender, LGBTQ issues, healing, and community building. They create not just for themselves but to inspire others to help build a just and compassionate society.

CREDITS– CO-HOSTS & PRODUCERS: Martha Cinader, Hernán Ramiro Rodriguez Sierra, Tony Robles. FEATURED GUESTS: Shizue Siegle, Shirley Ancheta, Mosab Abu Toha. MUSIC: Live Recording at The Blue Note of Principals of Freedom by Jay Rodriguez Sierra. SOUNDTRACK, MIXING, MASTERING, SOUND DESIGN: Hernán Ramiro Rodriguez Sierra. Executive Producer, Martha Cinader.

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