Jennifer Barone Holds Down Poetry and Holds Down North Beach
Italian American poet and artist Jennifer Barone is more than a writer, but a pillar of her community in North Beach and at Telegraph Books. She recently released a book of poetry titled Sirenland in May 2026, which intertwines womanhood and Italian folklore with her own experience as an American longing for connection to her Italian heritage. Her poetry is not only a career, but something that spills into every aspect of her life and identity. Additionally, Barone runs a podcast and designed and created the logo for Telegraph Books, as well as teaches yoga, hosts sound baths, runs writing workshops, and collects vintage typewriters. She even just found the Italian vintage Ferrari-red typewriter of her dreams.
I met Jennifer Barone for morning coffee at Caffè Trieste, a classic Italian-style coffee shop that sits at the heart of the North Beach horde. Small local businesses and artistic gathering spots are integral to Barone’s daily life in San Francisco, and they are also crucial values at Telegraph Hill Arts & Literature. When explaining North Beach’s charm, she pointed out, “But, you come in here, and you know you meet other writers.There's a lot of people here who are finishing their novel or working on a new one, and it's super inspiring to just get into conversations.” Small observations like that are demanded by a poet’s eyes, and if there ever was a poet, it was Barone. It was clear that poetry informed her whole livelihood and belief system, in and out of her writing.
Her recently published book, Sirenland, talks about the concept of sirens, especially in Italian historical mythology, through the lens of womanhood and her connection to a culture lost in assimilation. People seem to have one image of sirens: half-naked women sinking ships in the middle of the ocean. But Barone is here to elucidate that sirens are so much more than temptresses of death. There is more to the legend, she clarified, speaking of Naples: “The city was named after the siren, her whole body was the city. And there's many, many different protective legends.” Barone thinks of sirens more as ancestral protectors: “So there's all those other histories that nobody knows about that is a different side of the sirens. And so, there's the aspect of the voice of women, and that being profound and of course, in our society being suppressed or oppressed, you know? And the sirens had a song of wisdom. So my book has this thread of all of this kind of archaeological, mythological, but this other side too.” One aspect of Sirenland explores the pursuit of connections to relatives who lead different lives, to a homeland, and to her grandmother.
Barone attempts to visit Italy as much as she can, and she recently returned from Naples. She told me that she got the chance to visit the Naples Archaeological Museum and immerse herself in siren mythology. That sentiment trickles all the way back to North Beach’s historic Little Italy and Telegraph Books, with Barone musing, “And so for me, this bookstore is, like, very important for me. As a writer, but also as an Italian American.” Her previous poetry collection, Saporoso, Poems of Italian Food & Love, also hones in on this yearning for familial ties, except that she explores food and Italian culture. Barone laughed, saying that she knows it’s an Italian cliché to write about food, but that “...all of these food items have, also, mythological history, and folklore history.”
Despite being a writer at her core, Barone did not study writing, but went to school for art. She expressed how much her degree in the arts has informed her experience as a writer, saying, “And I feel like when you study art, you have to study a million subjects to understand art. Like, you have to understand history. World history, not just your own country, you know?” Along with her love for drawing, she illustrated the pictures that complement Sirenland.
A major part of Barone’s life also resides within her yoga teaching and sound bath orchestration. Sound is very important to the way Barone understands her body, writing, and the world, as she remarked, “So I do work with sound very much like a siren.” Another fascinating hobby of hers is collecting vintage typewriters. In fact, Barone often writes spontaneous poetry on her typewriters for strangers at events. In addition to that, Barone runs experiential writing workshops.
When asked why she writes, Barone responded, “It changes, you know? Because I've been writing since I was very little. Nonstop. Like, there's never been a break. And I keep a journal, too. And I also keep a dream journal.” She told me that the majority of her writing revolves around self-reflection. Barone discussed how sometimes poetry can seem unapproachable and difficult to integrate into one’s life. She voiced, “So I feel like poetry has the power to, you know, transform every day into something much greater and grander. And in truth, I feel like that beautiful grandeur of it is really what it is. You know what I mean? Like, life is beautiful. Like, every day is really profound. It's just that we need to see it.” One of her favorite things about writing spontaneous poetry for people is that it makes the art form more accessible, and that sometimes it can even make people cry. As previously touched on, Barone says writing is also deeply bound to her Italian heritage and is an attempt to form “...an expression of ecstatic nature. I was trying to tell the audience that Italian culture, to me, is ecstatic culture…We're very alive and on fire, a lot of the time.”
When talking about Barone’s first experiences with poetry, she said, “You would find me, in grade school at the library, in the poetry section on the floor with lots of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost around me. And I think I wrote a lot about nature when I was a little kid. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, so it was very much a concrete jungle. There wasn't really a lot of nature.” And that hunger for nature is what makes San Francisco such a distinctive city. However, she didn't originally come to San Francisco for the trees; she came for love. “I had fallen in love. I left my heart here. I kind of was ready to move, was ready to leave, and yeah, my love at the time brought me out here. It was a long distance, but he was a jazz musician. And within a month of everything out here, we had started a poetry and jazz night.” Barone still occasionally organizes curated readings. Beyond love, her former partner brought her something more valuable: a home in North Beach. She continued, “...But, yeah, I grew up in an Italian immigrant neighborhood in Brooklyn. And so, for me, coming to North Beach just feels like I belong here, you know?”
Along with the many reasons that make North Beach special, it also feels like a small town in a city. That allows Barone to be deeply entrenched in her community and the ebbs and flows of that particular corner of San Francisco. Especially with tech money pushing out locals who have been ingrained in the region for decades, Barone harbors a lot of worry for her neighbors and friends. Barone articulated, “...being evicted, which has been horrible, and I've actually been in protests, you know, trying to protect elder neighbors from being evicted, you know?” She divulged that knowing her neighbors is one of the most valuable parts of North Beach.
When asked about her writing process, Barone told me it consists of a combination of journaling and jotting down ideas in her Notes app. She refers to these ideas as muses: “I feel like I'm never missing out on the muse, you know, the muse comes in, and she comes in at crazy moments. So I have my muse list.” Barone also said that she finishes poems quite quickly but does not like to edit them for a while afterward. She likes to let the poems sit. Barone noted, “...I feel like when you edit something, you're in a different part of the brain, a different, you know, mindset. Like, the editing mind is very analytical. And the creative mind is a little bit lofty, you know?”
At the end of the day, Barone wants poetry to be accessible. That is why she always comes back to writing spontaneous poetry about strangers. People can access poetry when it’s about themselves.
Access poetry and Barone’s psyche in Sirenland and consider her writing workshop at Telegraph Hill Books / TelHiLit on November 12th. (https://telhil.it/Call-of-Siren-Workshop)
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