This installment of the Latinx & Proud! Reading Series features féi hernandez, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, Rodney Gomez, and Sarah A. Chavez-- all Sundress Publications authors. As we enter a new year, we are so excited to continue the work of celebrating Latinx artists, and empowering the local and national Latinx community. This event is in proud partnership with Sundress Publications.

¡Ven a celebrar con nosotros! (Come celebrate with us!)

féi hernandez (they/them) was born in Chihuahua, México and raised in Inglewood, CA. They are a trans non-binary visual artist, writer, and healer. féi is the author of Hood Criatura, published by Sundress Publications, 2020. Their writing has been featured in Poetry, Oxford Review of Books, Frontier, NPR’s Code Switch, Immigrant Report, Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity (Columbia University Press, 2019), Hayden's Ferry Review Issue 64, BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT, and PANK Magazine. They were a femmetor for the 2019-2020 Seeds of Liberación (SOL) leadership development program for young transgender, gender non-conforming, and intersex (TGI) people in Los Angeles. féi is a certified Reiki and Akashic Records practitioner who utilizes a decolonial approach to ancestral energetic healing. They collect Pokémon plushies. féi is the President of Gender Justice Los Angeles and is a Co-Founder of the ING Fellowship.

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and the author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications 2016). A former Steinbeck Fellow, Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner, and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grantee, she’s received residencies from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, National Parks Arts Foundation, and Poetry Foundation. She has work published in Acentos Review, CALYX, crazyhorse, [Pank], and American Poetry Review among others. Most recently her poem, "Battlegrounds" was featured at Poets.org's Poem-A-Day as part of a Latinx series. A dramatization of her poem "Our Lady of the Water Gallons," directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño, can be viewed at latinopia.com. She is a member of Miresa Collective and director of Women Who Submit.

Rodney Gomez serves as the Poet Laureate of McAllen, Texas. His poetry collections include Geographic Tongue (Pleiades Press, 2020). His work appears in Poetry, New England Review, The Gettysburg Review, North American Review, Verse Daily, and other journals. His chapbook Mouth Filled Night was awarded the Drinking Gourd Prize from Northwestern University’s Poetry and Poetics Colloquium. In 2020 he was awarded an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellowship. Rigoberto González has called Gomez a poet with a “remarkable vision” whose work “celebrates the borderlands, its strangeness and its stark beauty”. A member of the Macondo Writers Workshop, Gomez holds a BA from Yale and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas Pan American.

Sarah A. Chavez, a mestiza born and raised in the California Central Valley, is the author of the poetry collections, Hands That Break & Scar (Sundress Publications, 2017) and All Day, Talking (dancing girl press, 2014). Her new project, Halfbreed Helene Navigates the Whole received a 2019-2020 Tacoma Artists Initiative Award. Chavez teaches creative writing and Latinx/Chicanx-focused courses at the University of Washington Tacoma, serves as the poetry coordinator for Best of the Net Anthology, and is a proud member of the Macondo Writers Workshop. Recent work can be found or is forthcoming in Xicanx: Mexican American Writers of the 21st Century, Diode, & Hotel Amerika. Her micro chap, like everything else we loved, is forthcoming from Porkbelly Press in 2021.

Sundress Publications is a non-profit literary press collective founded in 2000, and is entirely volunteer-run. Sundress publishes chapbooks and full-length works in both print and digital formats, and hosts a variety of online journals. Their mission is to champion great work—especially by persons under-represented in literary publishing—and welcome writers and artists regardless of race, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, disability, religion, class, veteran status, and educational background. They are firm believers in fostering artists whose work is worthy of recognition. Sundress Publications envisions the manuscripts they publish as concept albums, not merely as collections of hot singles.

Adriana E. Ramírez, Eloisa Amezcua, Malcolm Friend & Karla Lamb

The mission of the Latinx & Proud! reading series is to incite conversation, empower, & amplify the Latinx community in Pittsburgh, PA & beyond.

Latinx & Proud! Reading Series ft. Sundress Publications