Lit & Luz at UIC
2022 Guests
Dolores Dorantes | Writer, Poet, Performer Heading link
Dolores Dorantes is Mexican, living in exile in the United States. She is a priest in the Mahajrya Buddhist tradition. She founded the organization Cielo Portátil (for a free education), and is a journalist and writer. She works on a range of collaborative writing projects with Rodrigo Flores Sánchez, Anthony McCann, Juan Manuel Portillo, and Ben Ehrenreich. She promotes autobiographical writing, mobile bookstores, and personalized poetry readings in unexpected public spaces. She has published six books, most recently Querida fábrica and Estilo.
She is currently working on a documentary-autobiographical book titled Estructura, a performance titled Prema, and a documentary film titled Global. Her socio-cultural crónicas and political-social reflections, as well as the majority of her books, are part of the commons at: www.doloresdorantes.blogspot.com. She believes in a United Latin America.
Robin Myers | Poet, Translator Heading link
Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based poet and Spanish-to-English translator. Her latest book-length translations include The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills (2022), Copy by Dolores Dorantes (2022), The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero (2022), Another Life by Daniel Lipara (2021), and The Science of Departures by Adalber Salas Hernández (2021). Other translations have appeared in Granta, The Baffler, Kenyon Review, The Common, Harvard Review, Two Lines, Waxwing, Asymptote, and elsewhere. She was among the winners of the 2019 Poems in Translation Contest (Words Without Borders / Academy of American Poets). As a poet, Robin’s work has been selected for the 2022 Best American Poetry anthology and appears in the The Drift, Poetry London, Yale Review, Denver Quarterly, Annulet Poetry Journal, Massachusetts Review, and other journals.
Her collections have been published as bilingual English-Spanish editions in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Spain. She is an alumna of the Vermont Studio Center, the Banff Literary Translation Centre, the Community of Writers, and Under the Volcano. She is represented by the Willenfield Literary Agency.
Anthony Cody | Poet Heading link
Anthony Cody is the author of Borderland Apocrypha (Omnidawn, 2020), winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Contest selected by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, he is a 2022 Whiting winner, 2021 American Book Award winner, a 2020 Poets & Writers debut poet and a 2020 Southwest Book Award winner. His collection was named a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, the PEN America / Jean Stein Book Award, the California Book Award, the LA Times Book Award in Poetry, as well as longlisted for The Believer Magazine 2020 Editor’s Award in Poetry. A CantoMundo fellow from Fresno, California, Anthony has lineage in both the Bracero Program and the Dust Bowl. His poetry has appeared in The Academy of American Poets: Poem-A-Day, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, The Colorado Review, The Boiler, ctrl+v journal, among others. Anthony co-edited How Do I Begin?: A Hmong American Literary Anthology, as well as co-edited and co-translated Juan Felipe Herrera’s Akrílica. He is a MFA-Creative Writing graduate from Fresno State and has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and Desert Nights, Rising Stars. Anthony won the inaugural 2020 CantoMundo Guzmán Mendoza / Paredez Fellowship for his work-in-progress poetry manuscript, selected by Aracelis Girmay. He has taught ecopoetry at Fresno State, and has read, lectured, and led workshops across the country. Anthony’s forthcoming collection, The Rendering, will be published in Spring 2023 by Omnidawn. He serves as a co-publisher of Noemi Press, a poetry editor for Omnidawn, a collaborator with Juan Felipe Herrera and the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio, and is visiting faculty in poetry at Randolph College‘s Low Residency MFA Program. He currently lives in Fresno, CA with his partner, the poet Mai Der Vang.
ire'ne lara silva | Poet Heading link
ire’ne lara silva is the author of four poetry collections, furia, Blood Sugar Canto, CUICACALLI/House of Song, and FirstPoems, two chapbooks, Enduring Azucares and Hibiscus Tacos, and a short story collection, flesh to bone, which won the Premio Aztlán. She and poet Dan Vera are also the co-editors of Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands, a collection of poetry and essays. ire’ne is the recipient of a 2021 Tasajillo Writers Grant, a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, and was the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award. Most recently, ire’ne was awarded the 2021 Texas Institute of Letters Shrake Award for Best Short Nonfiction. ire’ne is currently a Writer at Large for Texas Highways Magazine and is working on a second collection of short stories titled, the light of your body. Website: irenelarasilva.wordpress.com
Ruben Quesada | Poet Heading link
Ruben Quesada is the editor of a hybrid collection of essays, Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (November 15, 2022), collecting more than two dozen Hispanic and Portuguese poets. These essays explore the personal and academic practice of writing. He is the author of Revelations and Next Extinct Mammal: Poems.
He has served as poetry editor for AGNI, PANK, and Pleiades and as a poetry blogger for The Kenyon Review and Ploughshares. His writing appears in The New York Times, Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Kirkus, and Harvard Review. He is a Contributing Editor at Tab Journal at Chapman University.
Ruben has been honored by the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events in the City of Chicago with an artist grant and fellowships from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Canto Mundo, Lambda Literary, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Vermont Studio Center. He has served as a coordinator for PEN America’s literary awards committee and the Publishing Triangle Awards.
He has taught at Vermont College of Fine Arts, UCLA Writers’ Program, Poetry Foundation, and Tin House Workshops. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Antioch University-Los Angeles.
He is the 2022 Nonfiction Committee chair and on the National Book Critics Circle board. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.