Poetry Reading celebrating new collections from Brenda Cárdenas, author of Trace (Red Hen Press, 2023), and Béatrice Szymkowiak, author of B/RDS (University of Utah Press, 2023).

Brenda Cárdenas is the author of Trace (Red Hen Press), Boomerang (Bilingual Press), and three chapbooks, including From the Tongues of Brick and Stone (Momotombo Press). She also co-edited Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Spuyten Duyvil Press) and Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest (MARCH/Abrazo Press). Her poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Latinx Poetics: The Art of Poetry; TAB: Journal of Poetry and Poetics; Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations; Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment, and Healing; Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Anthology; The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry; and many others. Cárdenas has served as faculty for the CantoMundo writers’ retreat (2021) and as Milwaukee Poet Laureate (2010–12). She currently teaches Creative Writing and U.S. Latinx Literatures at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

Béatrice Szymkowiak is a French-American writer and scholar. She graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and a PhD in English/Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She is the author of Red Zone (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a poetry chapbook, the winner of the 2017 Omnidawn Single Poem Broadside Contest, and the recipient of the 2022 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry for her full-length collection B/RDS. Her work also has appeared in several poetry magazines including the Berkeley Review, Terrain.org, the Portland Review, OmniVerse, the Southern Humanities Review, and many others.

Poetry Reading: Brenda Cárdenas and Béatrice Szymkowiak