The Canessa Reading Series turns 21 in 2005, making it one of the longest-running independent poetry reading series in San Francisco. Jim Hartz, Ben Friedlander and Laura Moriarty started it in 1984 as an extension of the Tassajara Bakery series at Cole and Carl, itself an extension of the Grand Piano series. Hartz, former director of Intersection when it was on Union Street, was director of the SFSU Poetry Center at the time. Moriarty handed the Canessa series over to Spencer Selby in 1986, who ran it for six years. After that, Colleen Lookingbill and Jordan Zorker ran it for two years before handing over to the current coordinator, Avery Burns in 1995.