Reading

Inspired by the 2023 Latina Writers Conference in Los Angeles, the Latinas de las Americas reading will feature seven Latina poets with heritages spanning North, South, Central America, and the Carribean. As we celebrate the identities of the Americas, we honor each poet's individuality and power. 

This reading panel, featuring poets Paula Cisewski, Danika Stegeman, Angie Mazakis, and Darius Atefat-Peckham, formed around the idea of the "Ancestress," as illuminated in the Bjork song of the same name from her 2022 album Fossora. The idea of the ancestress explores the ways we evolve from and carry our mothers as well as broader ideas of birth, mothering, and the feminine forward in time. Our mothers survive pain and violence while also creating life and/or healing in the face of those things.

We all sleep.  Many of us have problems with sleep.  This 1/3 of our lives we spend asleep affects us all in different ways and has been a subject of poetry for centuries.  Our five poets will read work which engages with aspects of the sleep experience, from insomnia to dreams.

Celebrating their new release Last Night in America, poets Partridge Boswell and Peter Money, along with guitarist Nat Williams, fuse poetry and music in a passionate and surprising mash-up. Los Lorcas blur boundaries between spoken word and song, weaving poetry with Andalusian ballads, blues, rock, folk, reggae, hip hop, Americana and jazz in pursuit of the cante jondo (deep song) Federico Garcia Lorca so ardently championed.

Join four poets as they share the stage to read work that explores the transformative power of poetry to reclaim women's narratives. With a focus on risk-taking and holding space for vulnerability and authenticity, Kelli Russell Agodon, Ananda Lima, Simone Muench, and Melissa Studdard will read poems that call out injustices, refuse patriarchal limitations and controls, and celebrate aspects of women's lives that we are told should be taboo.

This reading will feature writers from Sublimity City, a poetry collective established in 2018 in Louisville, Kentucky. Kristi Maxwell will read poems from Goners, her book of extinctions, a form invented to linguistically engage human-induced species erasure.