Apr
17
7:00pm
National Poetry Month Celebration
By UCR Tomás Rivera Conference
Ariana Brown is a queer Black Mexican American poet from San Antonio, TX. She is the author of Sana Sana, a poetry chapbook with Game Over Books, and a 2014 national collegiate poetry slam champion. Ariana’s work investigates queer Black personhood in Mexican American spaces, queer Black futures, loneliness, and healing. She has been writing, performing, and teaching poetry for ten years.
Jasminne Mendez is a Dominican-American poet, educator, playwright and award winning author. Mendez has had poetry and essays published in numerous journals and anthologies. She is the author of two multi-genre collections Island of Dreams (Floricanto Press, 2013) which won an International Latino Book Award, and Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e: Personal Essays and Poetry (Arte Publico Press, 2018). Her debut poetry collection Machete will be released in 2022 (Noemi Press). Her second YA memoir A Bucket of Dirty Water: Memories of my Girlhood and her debut picture book Josefina’s Habichuelas (Arte Público Press) will be released in 2021. She is an MFA graduate of the creative writing program at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University and a University of Houston alumni
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the award-winning collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series 2017), recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, and fellowships from CantoMundo and Jack Jones Literary Arts. She is a doctoral candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is working on a poetry and an essay collection while raising her son in Los Angeles.
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