Pompa at Notre Dame: tonight

Deist—

Since Jesus never learned

English, he was promptly denied

a second coming

into Arizona

 from “Retablos: 10 Deleted Scenes”

 ---Paul Martínez Pompa

As the initial screener of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize I often get to encounter and enjoy a range of voices unknown to me. Such was the case back in November of 2003 when manuscripts for the first edition of the prize began to pile up in my office. Paul Martinez Pompa’s was one such voice. And although he was not selected as the winner that first year, his work struck me enough that we began to correspond by e-mail and I was able to persuade Paul to publish a chapbook with Momotombo Press, another Letras Latinas initiative. It was titled Pepper Spray. Here is how Chicano poet Luis J. Rodriguez opens his introduction to this slender volume:

Paul Martínez Pompa’s poems sizzle like Chicago on a sticky August night—as gunfire, a woman’s moans, a child’s cry, glass breaking, a drunken man falling, and a lonely saxophone drenches notes through blast-opened windows in leaning three-story brick buildings.

Vaya, homes, estas palabras matan.

Later he states:

I don’t know Paul Martinez Pompa personally. Yet as soon as I read his work, boom, there was a connection…

Pepper Spray went on to become one of Momotombo Press’s best selling titles, getting adopted in a number of university classrooms around the country, including at DePaul, in Paul’s hometown. He himself pursued his college degree at the University of Chicago before enrolling in the graduate writing program at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he served as the poetry editor of Indiana Review.  Paul has published his work in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry and Telling Tongues, A Latin@ Anthology on Language Experience.

In the summer of 2008, Martín Espada selected Paul’s manuscript—a manuscript he re-worked and submitted a second time—as the winner of the third edition of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Espada correctly characterizes the work in My Kill Adore Him, the title of the book, as “smart,” “gritty and visceral, but” without ever “cross[ing] the line to sensationalism.” But he also designates Paul as “a poet of meticulous craft.” I have a confession to make: yesterday I was re-reading, probably for the third or fourth time, My Kill Adore Him. The opening lines of “Pulling Tongue” (p. 5) read:

Lissette opens me with her fingers.

I struggle to breathe

With her tongue in my mouth.

Suddenly we are stars

In a Mexi-Rican film

…

By poem’s end it occurs to me, for the first time: the poem has an ABBA rhyme scheme throughout—delicate, just right. And that’s how Paul’s poems work on you, over time.

(Luis Rodriguez is so right, then, when he says of his poems: “Visit them several times. Some come at you sideways. When you least expect it.”)

But Espada, in his introduction to Paul’s book, also highlights Paul’s deft use of humor and irony:

 “Nowhere else will you find a poem celebrating a Mexican grandmother’s phone call to the local Pizza Hut.”

 Let me close with part of what Chicana poet, Lorna Dee Cervantes, has to say about our poet:

 “Straddling literary strategies, no supposition nor paradigm is safe. He slays the stereotypic dragons within as well as without, putting popular culture, elegy, nightmare, personal narrative, identity and gender politics in the same hat, and drawing from the source, Pompa plays a poetic hand for keeps.”

 Please join me in welcoming Paul Martinez Pompa.

Reading Report: Paul Martínez Pompa at louderARTS

Paul Martínez Pompa at louderARTS
Photo courtesy of louderARTS
Originally uploaded by OBermeo

On April 19th, Paul Martínez Pompa graced the stage of one of New York City's most respected reading series–louderARTS at Bar13. Co-curator Marie-Elizabeth Mali* recounts the highlights of his feature for Letras Latinas:

I’ve been looking forward to Paul Martínez Pompa’s  feature for louderARTS ever since reading his first book, My Kill Adore Him, which won the 2008 Andrés Montoya Prize.

He kicked off his 20-minute set by reading from an Exquisite Corpse he participated in along with 11 other poets, coordinated by John Michael Martinez. The poem responds to a question about the current state of Latino letters. He read from his contribution, called “Who?” including the lines, “. . . Mexo-lite so white folk don’t choke. Where my mojados at, black? I pass for snow. Down, ‘cause my asshole is brown . . .”

With that, our delighted audience knew we were in for some good political writing from the go.

He followed with several poems from the book, starting with “Retablos: 10 Deleted Tongues,” a poem about language and assimilation. A moment that called forth moans from the crowd: “I will not speak Spanish in class. I will not speak Spanish in class. I will not speak.”

Paul next joked about how every Chicano poet has to write a poem about each of these three subjects: Che Guevara, Frida Kahlo, and his/her grandmother, and read the two out of three that he’s written. Rich Villar, of the Acentos Foundation, called out that it works that way for Puerto-Rican poets, too. I agree, there are some subjects that span Latino/a cultures, especially for those of us in the diaspora.

“A Lesson in Masculinity,” a very short poem, had us all laughing, about his mother teaching him to wipe and his Papi saying, “No–men don’t wipe, they shake.”

He followed with a poem about cops and mistaken identity (“Officer Friendly”), another including the image of marking the parking spot in Chicago you’ve dug out of the snow with an ironing board, milk crate, lawn chair, whatever you can find (“Elegy for Winter”), a moving poem for his sister (“Sieve”), a tongue-in-cheek poem on chain clothing stores (“Banana Republic Politick”), and a poem about El Gato Negro, a transgender bar primarily for Latinos in Chicago that no longer exists (“Men Watching Men”).

He ended his set with a poem sending up the stylistic differences between “academic” and “performance” poets on the mic, called “Ego Slippin’.” Written in two parts, “The Performer” and “The Academic,” he repeated the line “Look at me” in various ways for both parts. He performed them heavily in the first part and stared at the paper in the second. He had our audience, one that bridges academics and performance, in hysterics with that apt commentary.

His skill at bringing subjects relevant to many Latino/as into his poems in an intimate, personal way was in evidence throughout his set. His work, though often pointed, never came across as heavy-handed. To all who say political work doesn’t have grounding in craft, I say you should read Paul Martínez Pompa’s poetry. His writing is well-crafted on the level of sound, word choice, and line, and it’s permeated by the world we live in, finely witnessed.

Check back on the www.louderarts.com website for streaming audio of the reading, which should be posted in a few weeks. You’ll also find our schedule of upcoming features there, as well as audio of other readings and writing prompts.

* Marie-Elizabeth Mali is a Venezuelan-American and Swedish poet who lives in New York City. She is a co-curator of louderARTS: the Reading Series at Bar 13 Lounge and Page Meets Stage at the Bowery Poetry Club and is a poetry editor for TIFERET: A Journal of Spiritual Literature. Her work has appeared in Calyx, MiPOesias, and RATTLE, among others. www.memali.com

LETRAS LATINAS is pleased to announce

Diana Marie Delgado, currently residing in Astoria, a neighborhood of Queens in New York City, is the third recipient of the Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship. She will receive $1000 and be in residence for one month this July at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota. This annual distinction is part of an ongoing partnership between the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame and the Anderson Center. The aim of this initiative is to identify and support a Latino or Latina writer who is working on a first full-length book, and for whom a one month residency would suppose a significant boost in this endeavor. Previous recipients of this fellowship have been: Michelle Otero in 2008, and John Chávez in 2009. There is no application process.

*

Born in California, Diana Marie Delgado grew up in the San Gabriel Valley. She studied poetry at the University of California in Riverside and Columbia University, where she received her MFA.

She has taught poetry workshops to at-risk youth and adults throughout the country, and presently coordinates a Family Literacy program in Queens, New York. The winner of numerous awards of support, she has received a McNamara Travel Grant and the James D. Phelan Award from the San Francisco Foundation for the Arts.

Her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Bordersenses, The Indiana Review, Lumina, Ninth Letter, Perihelion, Pistola, and other literary journals. Additional audio recordings of her work can be heard at From the Fishouse.

*

“As a writer attempting to complete a debut collection of poetry, this amazing opportunity could not be better timed. My struggle to write and make a living is a challenge many writers face, making me all the more grateful for this reprieve.”

—Diana Marie Delgado

*
Letras Latinas relies on the philanthropic generosity of both institutions and, to a large degree, individuals. The Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship exists, in large part, because of the Anderson Ccnter, founded and headed by Robert Hedin, poet, translator and visionary. The 2010 Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship counted on the particular generosity of Martha Aragon, who underwrote fifty percent of this year's stipend.

Jimmy Santiago Baca on writing "Stories from the Edge"

Renowned author and poet Jimmy Santiago Baca discusses the writing process for his latest book Stories from the Edge with ReLeah Cossett Lent.

Poetry Daily's Poet's Picks during National Poetry Month

William Archila's Poetry Month Pick, April 21, 2010

Sonnet 18
by John Milton (1608-1674) 

Avenge O Lord thy slaughter’d Saints, whose bones
Lie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold;
Ev’n them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our Fathers worship’t Stocks and Stones,
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy Sheep, and in their antient Fold
Slain by the bloody Piemontese, that roll’d
Mother with Infant down the Rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubl’d to the Hills, and they
To Heav’n. Their martyr’d blood and ashes sow
O’er all th’Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who, having learnt thy way,
Early may fly the Babylonian wo.

 William Archila Comments:

When I first came across this Pertrarchan sonnet by Milton, it was the middle of a winter night in Oregon, and I was touched by its tone—a release of profound emotion. I read it aloud to myself in the silence of the house. It’s the testimony of a massacre, a plea for the dead. The message came to me as if it was a kind of pilgrim that had set out from the Alps. It captured my imagination and sent me on my own pilgrimage to the village of El Mozote, in Morazán, El Salvador, on December 11, 1981, when soldiers of the army’s select, American-trained Atlacatl Battalion, murdered hundreds of men, women and children in an anti-guerrilla campaign during the Salvadoran Civil War.

The “Slaughter’d saints,” in Milton’s sonnet, were the Vaudois, who lived isolated in the foothills of the Alps. They were descendants of the Waldeneses, a Christian sect that rose after 1170 in southern France, under the leadership of Peter Waldo, and broke with the papacy over dogmas and practices around 1179. Like them, the Vaudois believed the Bible to be the sole guide to salvation. In order to eliminate unorthodox opinion and thus achieve approval from the pope, the Duke of Savoy ordered the Vaudois to abandon their beliefs. This inspired a fanatic army of Savoyards, French, and Irish to attack the Vaudois on April 24, 1653/5? In the eyes of the Protestants, the Vaudois were the true Christians who for hundreds of years had kept alive the teachings of Christ. The army, without warning, killed an estimated 1,712 men, women and children.

I admire the way Milton addresses God to remember the massacre of these “slaughter’d saints” on judgment day—“Forget not: in thy book record their groans.” He asks for revenge. The Piemontese had been the original sheep of God. They followed the lord’s gospel while “all our Fathers worship’d Stocks and Stones.” This act of vengeance comes from “Avenge, O Lord” to “Babylonian wo.” This is truly an example of anger. It seems impossible for Milton not to be haunted by the massacre in Piedmont. I am struck by his outrage and capacity for protest. There’s an emotional trumpet sounded here.

Perhaps the reason why I’m drawn to this sonnet is because of Milton’s voice. It carries a sense of lament for the dead. He calls them “Saints,” and talks of their scattered bones, mother and infant rolled down the rocks of mountains. The most significant detail of appraisal is the notion that their moans are redoubled in the hills, their souls gone to heaven, and their “martyr’d blood and ashes” strewn on Italian fields.

Perhaps I’m drawn to the sonnet because of the way Milton manages to release his emotions within the limits of the form. The first quatrain rides on the “Forget not” phrase. The sestet begins either with “Their moans” in the eighth line or in the tenth line with “Their martyr’d blood,” which doesn’t matter because the octave and the sestet are joined together into one whole unit. There seems to be no separation between the octave and the sestet. He enjambs, and begins a new sentence at the end of the eighth line, introducing the theme of the sestet. This change implies a change of mood or a turn in the poem. It moves from anger to a plea for salvation.
I love the way this poem makes me feel because it reminds me that in moments of outrage, we’re experiencing a deep emotional sense of dejection. We’re angry, so we bargain. We ask ourselves, “What can I do to lessen the blow?” Milton’s answer is this sonnet, and for the reader it is the creative act of connecting with another voice. Close engagement with a poet’s work is in itself a form of creation. It is a beautiful elegy, and it brings me closer to coming to terms with the death of the many unburied men, women and children in El Mozote. Milton has hammered his loss into the text and it is done out of respect for the dead. In this sonnet, Piedmont, like El Mozote, is not forgotten.
 About William Archila:

William Archila lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife. He earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon. His poems have been published in The Georgia Review, AGNl, Poetry International, The Los Angeles Review, Notre Dame Review, Crab Orchard Review, Obsidian III, Rattle, Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, Portland Review and Blue Mesa Review among others. His poems also will be appearing in Luvina Literary Magazine and Eclipse. He has been awarded the Alan Collins Scholarship at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He has also received a nomination for a Pushcart Prize in 2010. His first book The Art of Exile is the recent winner of the Emerging Writer Fellowship Award from the Writer’s Center. The Art of Exile is also currently featured in “First Things First: The Fifth Annual Debut Poets Roundup”—the Jan/Feb 2010 issue of Poets & Writers.

On the Guggenheim Foundation Website Today:

"Mr. Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet, Redlands, California; Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair in Poetry, University of California, Riverside: Poetry."

ACENTOS Festival of Latino and Latina Poets, April 17, 2010

The crew

In this photo: Urayoán Noel, Willie Perdomo, Jani Bomba Rose, Martin Espada, Anthony Morales, John Rodriguez, Jessica Filion, LiYun Alvarado, Fish Vargas, Jose Vilson, Diana Marie Delgado, Puma Perl, Gloria Fontanez, Marie-Elizabeth Mali, Mardeah Gbotoe, Paul Martinez Pompa, Rachel McKibbens, Carlos Andrés Gómez, Rich Villar, Tara Betts.

photo courtesy of Marie-Elizabeth Mali

Reading Report: Martín Espada and Rich Villar at Page Meets Stage

Martín Espada, Marie-Elizabeth Mali and Rich Villar
Photo courtesy of Marie-Elizabeth Mali
Originally uploaded by OBermeo

It's 21st Century Poesia as I trade in the moleskine and audience seat for a Twitter feed and laptop then tune into the latest installment of the Page Meets Stage reading series to watch Martín Espada and Rich Villar explore and blur the lines between poems crafted for live performance and poesia drafted for publication.

First, a little about the reading series: Page Meets Stage is a monthly poetry series that pairs more page-oriented, academic poets with poets who come from a more spoken-word or performative background. Both poets are on stage at the same time and read back and forth, poem for poem, sometimes answering each other and other times taking the conversation in a different direction.

The series also donates all its proceeds to Bowery Arts & Sciences, the educational arm of the Bowery Poetry Club dedicated to the preservation and enhancement of the oral tradition of poetry via live readings, media documentation and creation.

And thanks to the Bowery, I was able to enjoy this phenomenal New York City reading from the comfort of my home in Oakland courtesy of the free and high-quality webcast via Bowery Poetry Live.

So with live stream in full effect, I open up my Mac and not only start to enjoy the poetic interchange between Espada and Villar but also share my thoughts on the reading via Twitter. Here's the time stream from @OBermeo as the reading was in progress:

• Thank you, internet poetry gods (and @bobholmanpoet) for the live broadcast of Martín Espada & @ElProfe316 at the Page Meets Stage reading.

• Martín Espada just dropped "En La Calle San Sebastian" www.martinespada.net/enlacalle.htm one of my all time faves #PageMeetsStage

• He's going ole skool! @ElProfe316 drops "Noche Buena" A slam classic for sure and a damn good poem by any rubric #PageMeetsStage

• Martín Espada schools #PageMeetsStage on the legacy of Nuyorican Poet Jack Agüeros. Don't know him? Get the knowledge: www.poets.org/jague

• More knowledge: @ElProfe316 recites a poem where he converses with THE Boricua Poet: Julia de Burgos http://bit.ly/9mAWw6 #PageMeetsStage

• Martín takes the pass from Rich and drops his own Julia de Burgos poem: www.martinespada.net/the_face_on_the_envelope.htm #PageMeetsSatge

• Did @ElProfe316 just say "misnomer maps" in a poem? I see you, sun. #GameRecognizesGame #PageMeetsStage

• "Latinos, we defy classification." - Martín Espada (Add that to the archives @LibraryCongress) #PageMeetsStage

• "Espada: cousin to the machete, peasant cutlass" www.martinespada.net/myname.htm #PageMeetsStage

• "This is part truth, part lie" @ElProfe316 reflects on the poetic origins of his own name. PS- Don't call him, Lil Ricky. #PageMeetsStage

• Time for the Q&A. @MeMali cuts to the heart of it: "What is the craft of political poetry?" #PageMeetsStage

• "Some of these poets become sanitized once they're canonized." - Martín Espada #PageMeetsStage

• “Why do we create unnecessary divisions when the true problem is unity?” - Martín Espada #PageMeetsStage

• “There’s power in collectiveness. I’m trying to reach out to people who think like me.” - @ElProfe316 #PageMeetsStage

• On Code-Switching: “English con Español like arroz con pollo, the two languages are always present.” - Martín Espada #PageMeetsStage

• On Code-Switching: “Being bilingual opens all kinds of possibilities” - @ElProfe316 #PageMeetsStage

• @ElProfe316 Sun, where that new shit? #ImJusAskin #PageMeetsStage

• Rich does a cover of Martín's poem "Thanksgiving" www.smith.edu/poetrycenter/poets/thanksgiving.html #PageMeetsStage

• Status = Stupefied. Only @ElProfe316 can do a poem with the voices of Krusty the Clown & Marvin the Martian & make it work. #PageMeetsStage

• Status = Dead. Martín covers Rich's Inauguration Day Poem and recites the phrase "Lightin MFers like Steven Seagal" #PageMeetsStage

• Rich http://bit.ly/d8Gtno and Martín http://bit.ly/cpBDbb explore how their fathers introduced them to poetry. #PageMeetsStage

• @nisao Glad they're reachin you, Anisa. It's wonderful to connect with folks.

• The necessary milk: Martín Espada reading "Alabanza" www.martinespada.net/alabanza.htm #PageMeetsStage

There's a lot of code to decipher here if you are not familiar with Twitter speak (does this make me trilingual?) so I'll translate out my thoughts and include a great Jack Agüeros story that could not live within Twitter's 140 character constraints:

"Martín Espada and Rich Villar engaged each other in an open poetic conversation that included musicality, upbringing, family ties and code-switching among the topics, and allowed the audience to listen in on this conversation.

Espada traveled through the length and breadth of his obra, reading poems from early in his literary career all the way to the title poem from his upcoming collection The Trouble Ball. Every poem was read with a sense of urgency and call to action, speaking not only to the timelessness of Espada's writing but also how very far we have to keep going as a nation (Post racial, what? Tea Party, who?) until we can say all our citizens are free. History is also alive and well in Espada's setlist for the night, not the history of textbooks or CNN but the history of a poeta who gathers allies every chance he gets, marshalls them with stories of other great poet warriors (Julia de Burgos, Jack Agüeros, Omar Khayyám) and charges forward with a battle cry that signals the arrival of the poets and the dead they speak for.  Alabanza, indeed.

Villar set it off with a signature poem from his time as a top-ranked NYC and Nationals level poetry slam competitor, "Noche Buena." Like Espada, Villar's work is holding up to the test of time, he hits every rubric for a successful oral poem while reaching deeper to not tell us he's proud of his heritages but leaving us with the lasting image of a son receiving bendicion from his ancestors and being sent out to continue the work. Vaya, muchacho/Aquí esta tu vida.  And that vida is poetry with new poems coming from Villar that take advantage of his position as poet citizen by critiquing the (so called) center at its very heart with poetry riddled in Spanglish, politics and commitment.

Both poets did this with a healthy code of code-switching and I'll let Espada take over as he recounts how true Nuyorican poet Jack Agüeros defines bilingualism in United States Poesia:

“Well English and Spanish are like two dogs I love.
For me, English is a good dog. 
I say, ‘English, sit!’  English sits.
But Spanish, Spanish is a bad dog. 
I say, ‘Spanish, sit!’ Spanish pees on the rug.
But I love em, I love em both.”

The engaging Q&A, led my poeta and MC for the evening, Marie-Elizabeth Mali, brought up issues of polarity amongst Latino poetry, defining the rigor of political poetry, the relationship between the Mother and Step-Mother Tongues and creating a body of community.  I could go over the responses to the questions but you'd find much better answers in Espada's broad body of work and Villar's community activism, two streams in the river of poetry that are bound to cross paths again."

Poesia en NYC: April 15-17, 2010

Martín Espada reads from Alabanza
Originally uploaded by OBermeo

It's a great week to be in New York as Martín Espada, often called “the Latino poet of his generation” and “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors,” will be spearheading a trio of readings that celebrate mentorship, activism, and community.

Not in Nueva York this week? No worries! As the kick-off event, Page Meets Stage, will be broadcast on live on the internet at www.bowerypoetry.com.

Thursday, April 15 @ 8pm
Bowery Poetry Club
PAGE MEETS STAGE
featuring Martín Espada and Rich Villar
308 Bowery between Houston and Bleecker.
$12 cover.

Friday, April 16 @ 7pm
Miller Theatre
LA CURA DEL ENCANTO
featuring poetry by Martín Espada and music by Yerbabuena
2960 Broadway
$20 tickets

Saturday, April 17 @ 7pm
Sweetwater's Bar and Grill
ACENTOS PRESENTS: A FESTIVAL OF LATINO AND LATINA POETS
Featuring Martín Espada, LiYun Alvarado, Diana Marie Delgado, Carlos Andres Gomez, Marie-Elizabeth Mali, Paul Martínez Pompa, Anthony Morales, Urayoán Noel, and Willie Perdomo. Special guests.  Hosted by Fish Vargas.
FREE.

Scenes from the One Poem Festival

This year's edition of the One Poem Festival once again gathered a variety of Latino and Latina poets to share a single poem in front of colleagues and friends during AWP. We were also lucky enough to hear from the judge of this year's Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, Silvia Curbelo, as she announced this year's winner: Emma Trelles.

Many thanks to all the organizers and Dikeou Collection for bringing us all together for an evening that displayed the diversity and scope of contemporary Latino Poetry in the US.

Scenes from the One Poem Festival

LIST OF READERS

Oscar Bermeo
Richard Blanco
Xánath Caraza
John Chávez
David Dominguez
Mario Duarte
Juliana Aragón Fatula
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
Diana García
Liz Gonzalez
Tim Z. Hernández
Sheryl Luna
J. Michael Martínez
Michael Luis Medrano
Maria Melendez
Carolina Monsiváis
Juan J. Morales
Kristin Naca
Emmy Pérez
Manuel Ramos
John Michael Rivera
Danny Solis
Carmen Giménez Smith
Gloria Vando
Dan Vera
Rich Villar

MC: John-Michael Rivera

AWP photo of the conference?

Sacred Art: Writing to Change the World. 

Ruth Behar, Norma Cantu, Liz Gonzalez, Sandra Cisneros, Carolina Monsivais and Michelle Otero

photo: courtesy of Carolina Monsivais

AND THE WINNER IS......EMMA TRELLES

Last night at approximately 8:30 PM, final judge Silvia Curbelo took the stage at the end of the One Poem Festival in Denver, CO to announce the winner of the 4th edition of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Poetry Prize. Later that evening, the winner was spotted at Peaks Lounge on the 27th Floor of the Hyatt Regency having drinks with Richard Blanco, Sarah Browning, David Dominguez and others...presumably in celebration mode.

Emma Trelles is the author of Little Spells, a chapbook of poems published by GOSS183. Her work has appeared in publications such as Verse Daily, 3 AM Magazine, Oranges and Sardines, OCHO, Gulf Stream, Newsday, the Miami Herald, Latina magazine, and the Sun- Sentinel, where she was the art critic for three years. She has been a featured author at the Miami Book Fair International and at the Palabra Pura Series in Chicago. She is the editor of MiPOesias Magazine's American Cuban Issue, the recipient of a Green Eyeshade Award for art criticism, and a Pushcart Prize nominee for poetry. Sometimes she teaches creative writing at the Florida Center for the Literary Arts or at the Art Center/South Florida. Emma is a regular contributor to The Best American Poetry blog. Read her rambles here: http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com...

AWP Off-Site: ONE POEM FESTIVAL

FRIDAY, APRIL 9

6:30 - 9 PM

@

Dikeou Collection

1615 California St., Suite 515

Denver, CO 80202

(303) 623-3001

www.dikeoucollection.org

featuring

Aaron A. Abeyta

Naomi Ayala

Oscar Bermeo

Richard Blanco

Xánath Caraza

Lorna Dee Cervantes

John Chávez

David Dominguez

Mario Duarte

Juliana Aragón Fatula

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher

Diana García

Liz Gonzalez

Tim Z. Hernández

Lisa Jimenez

Sheryl Luna

J. Michael Martínez

Michael Luis Medrano

Maria Melendez

Carolina Monsiváis

Juan J. Morales

Kristin Naca

Emmy Pérez

Manuel Ramos

John Michael Rivera

Carmen Giménez Smith

Gloria Vando

Dan Vera

Rich Villar

MC: John-Michael Rivera

*

e-flyer designed

by

elena minor