
Inner Forest Service
Chris Kerr edits the Inner Forest Service from Oakland, CA. Chris is a writer, artist, and parent who has headed the
School of Literary Arts at Oakland School for the Arts and now focuses on helping mitigate the climate crisis. This includes directing Round Weather (a nonprofit art gallery that raises funds for environmental organizations and
activists), volunteering with Art + Climate Action, and serving on the DNC's Council on the Environment and
Climate Crisis.
Chris also founded and edited Projector, the magazine of creative response to film, and Nomenclatter, a one-of-a-kind literary journal where a workshop live-tweeted its writing advice and published the resulting poems monthly. He has organized events that bridge artistic disciplines for the Berkeley Art Museum, Rock Paper Scissors Collective, the Roxie Theater, and SFMOMA; performed their poems at Aggregate Space, a.Muse Gallery, and Art & Music in the Gardens
at Lake Merritt; and displayed her language-based artwork at E.M. Wolfman, MacArthur Annex, and Merritt College's climate crisis exhibition Cherish and Resist. Poems and stories by Chris appear in Eleven Eleven, The New Review of Literature, Sugar Mule, Work, and here:
Elledge Peak
Lightning strikes a valley oak
and ants vanish from a branch
above outstretched stems and blades
of a California fescue—burst of soil—
bluegreen cloud casting up sunshafts.
