Who Are the Molotov Mouths?

Ananda Esteva was born in Chile and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. A gifted storyteller, she intertwines bilingual poetry and song to paint a picture of life in Las Americas. She has performed and published internationally and co-authored Poetry For the People, ground breaking curriculum based on the teachings of June Jordan.

Leroy Franklin Moore Jr. is a disabled African American writer, poet, and community activist. He has been sharing his perspective on identity, race & disability for the last thirteen years. His work began in London, England where he discovered a Black Disabled Movement which help led to the creation of his lecture series; "On the Outskirts: Race & Disability." Leroy F. Moore Jr. is also the Founder of Disability Advocates of Minorities Organization, (DAMO) in Oakland, California. He has studied, worked and lectured in the field of race and disability in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and South Africa. Leroy currently lectures for Speak Out, a national speaker's bureau.

His readings, lectures and workshops are a mixture of personal, historical, political and cultural experiences and the raw reality of being Black and disabled in the U.S. In his workshops and performances he looks at crimes against people of color with disabilities.

James Tracy is a long time organizer active in anti-poverty work. He is the author of The Civil Disobedience Handbook: A Brief History and Practical Guide For The Politically Disenchanted (Manic D Press), The Donut Hole (Kapow Press) and Tourist Traps of the Twenty-Third Century (Kapow Press). He has written articles for Sheterforce, Race, Poverty and the Environment, Maximum Rock and Roll, and Processed World. His short history of dot com era displacement in San Francisco was recently published by City Lights Books in the anthology The Political Edge.

Josiah Luis Alderete is a full blooded Pocho Indian who refries his beans and poemas in Spanglish. Although a proud son of San Francisco’s Mission District, he currently resides in a gigantic poema somewhere in East Oakland.

The Extended Molotov Family

Dani Montgomery has taught creative writing and ran a youth internship program for the San Francisco Arts Commission's WritersCorps program. She also worked for The Center for Young Women's Development, an organization that works with young women involved in the juvenile justice system and underground street economies to promote social change and self-determination. She has been published in a number of magazines and anthologies, including: The Civil Disobedience Handbook, The Santa Clara Review, and Anything That Moves. Her poem "Dear Brother" convinced her brother to stay out of the military and was awarded a
"Best of the Bay" Award by the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Raw Knowledge is not only an amazing poet performer, but also delivers the hip-hop goods as part of the Entartete Kunst collective (under the name 187). Check out their CD States Of Abuse- for some of the hardest hitting anarcho-polemics ever set to a beat. She has a full length CD entitled Nemesis to Silence and also appears on the compilation Bread and Roses. If she ever finds the time, we would love to share the stage with her again.

Jewnbug came with us on our first West Coast Tour four years ago and has since given birth to a child and remains part of Poor Magazine’s Po Poets Project.

Solidad Di Costa is a Bay Area spoken word artist, trans activist and active in the Global Justice Movement. She has several chapbooks and CDs under her belt and helped to produce "We Interrupt This Empire," a documentary about the anti-war direct action protests in San Francisco.

George Tirado helped to found the Molotov Mouths, and will not be turning up at any shows in the future.