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Dear Poets and Friends,

Poetry.LA just added two intriguing new poets to its expanding collection of online videos: Natalie Díaz and Sarah Vap.

We caught up with them in May at Hitched, a reading series spotlighting emerging poets that Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo curates monthly at Beyond Baroque.

Natalie’s collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. Sarah’s latest collection, Arco Iris, was published by Saturnalia Books also in 2012.

For more information about the poets including links to buy their books, you can go to the poet’s individual page by clicking on All Poets. Then click that poet’s name.

Best to you,

Hilda Weiss and Wayne Lindberg
Poetry.LA

A video showcase of poets &
poetry venues in Southern California

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Editor in Chief
Sally Ashton

Editor
Marjorie Manwaring
Associate Editors
W. Todd Kaneko, Arlene Kim, Anne M. Doe Overstreet
Poet’s Bookshelf Editor
Peter Davis

DMQ Review is pleased to announce the release of the Spring 2013 issue featuring the poetry of Jada Ach, John Amen, Mary Donnelly, Glenn Halak, Elizabyth Hiscox, Michaelsun Stonesweat Knapp, Janet Norman Knox, Mercedes Lawry, Karen An-hwei Lee, Emily O’Neill, Alan Soldofsky, Tim Suermondt, and Anthony Warnke, with artwork by Carolyn Krieg.

In collaboration with Peter Davis, editor of Poet’s Bookshelf: Contemporary Poets On Books That Shaped Their Art, Volumes I & II, the DMQ Review is also pleased to present the Bookshelf essay as well as new poems from Charles Harper Webb as our “Featured Poet.”

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Carolyn Krieg © 2013 All Rights Reserved

ARCHIVES

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KPFA Radio & La Peña Cultural Center present

NANCY MOREJÓN
Fresh from Cuba, the celebrated poet and public intellectual

Presented by AL YOUNG
California Poet Laureate emeritus, novelist, essayist

& Kathleen Weaver 
poet, biographer, translator

Thursday, June 13, 7:30 pm

La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94705
map

$10 advance tickets, $12 door:    www.Lapena.org

benefit for KPFA + La Peña

information: www.kpfa.org/events

NANCY MOREJÓN is the best known and most widely translated woman poet of post-revolutionary Cuba. Born in 1944 in Havana to a militant dock worker and a trade-unionist seamstress, Morejón graduated from Havana University. She was Cuba’s first black woman poet to be internationally acclaimed as a poet. Her distinctive poetry is shaped by an Afro-Cuban sensibility and an eloquent concern for Cuban nationhood, cultural fusion, and the rights of women. She has published more than twenty volumes of poetry, as well as critical works and translations from French and English. Her works in English translation include Looking Within / Mirar adentro, Selected Poems 1954-2000, Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing, translated by U.S. poet Kathleen Weaver, and With Eyes and Soul/Images of Cuba with photographs by Milton Rogovin.  For many years, Morejón served on the editorial staff of UNEAC (Union of Cuban Writers and Artists). Currently she is president of the Cuban Writers’ Union, UNEAC, and an advisor at Casa de las Americas in Havana.

 Morejón has won Cuba’s prestigious National Literary Award, the National Prize for Poetry, and the National Award in Criticism – as well as many international awards, including the Latin American Studies Association Cuba Prize. Thoroughly bilingual, she has read and lectured at universities in the U.S.  She served as writer in residence at Wellesley College and conducted a two-day symposium on her work at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Howard University Press has published a collection of critical texts on her work: Singular Like a Bird: The Art of Nancy Morejón.

AL YOUNG  is a distinguished writer, poet, fiction writer, anthologist, and educator. His  many honors include Poet Laureate of California, the PEN-Library of Congress Award for Short Fiction, the PEN-USA Award for Non-Fiction, two American Book Awards, and the Richard Wright Award for Excellence in Literature. His writings have been translated into many languages, including Russian, and Urdu. His works in fiction include Seduction By Light and Sitting Pretty; in poetry, Something About the Blues, and Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons: Poems 2001-2006.

 In the 1970’s Young wrote film scripts for producer Joseph Strick, Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, and Richard Pryor. In the 1980’s and 90’s, as a cultural ambassador for the United States Information Agency, he traveled throughout South Asia, Egypt, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian West Bank. In 2001 he traveled to the Persian Gulf to lecture on American and African American literature and culture in Kuwait and in Bahrain for the U.S. Department of State. Subsequent lecture tours have taken him to Southern Italy in 2004, and back to India in 2005.. Blending story, recitation and song, Young often performs live with musicians. In 2005, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed him Poet Laureate of California.

 Kathleen Weaver is a poet, author of the biography, Peruvian Rebel,The Life and Work of Magda Portal; co-editor of The Penguin Book of Womens’ Poetry and The Other Voice; translator of  Nancy Morejón, Julio Cortázar, Omar Cabezas, and many others.

NOTE: Nancy Morejón and Kathleen Weaver will also appear Sunday, June 9, in San Francisco at the Emerald Tablet

Contact: Bob Baldock  |  bob@kpfa.org  |  510.848.5006

Nancy Morejón reads at the First International Festival of Poetry of Resistance, Toronto 2009

 “Mujer Negra,” a poem by Nancy Morejón translated by Kathleen Weaver @ Tumblr

Excerpt

I still smell the foam of the sea they made me cross.
The night, I can not remember it.
The ocean itself could not remember that …

Fragmento

Todavía huelo la espuma del mar que me hicieron atravesar.
La noche, no puedo recordarla.
Ni el mismo océano podría recordarla …

© La Peña Cultural Center

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SFJazz Center Calendar and Ticket Information

SFJAZZ Poetry Festival: Icons

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POETRY IN MOTOWN | April 2013

Click on image to enlarge

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