Past Guests & Speakers
Radical Poetics & Performance Guests
Saretta Morgan | Writer
Saretta Morgan is the author of Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024) and Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling Press, 2018). The recipient of grants and residencies from the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP), the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Jerome Foundation, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts, she lives on Akimel O’odham lands.
Patricia Killelea | Writer
Patricia Killelea is a writer and poetry filmmaker living in the western Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Her poetry films have been officially selected and screened at Det Poetiske Fonoteque: Nature & Culture Poetry Film Festival, the Ó’Béal International Poetry-Film Competition, a Finalist for the Frame to Frames Ekphrastic Poetry Film Prize and Official Selection for the FOTOGENIA Film Poetry & Divergent Narratives Festival. Her other poetry films have received Honorable Mention at the Midwest Video Poetry Fest and were longlisted for the Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival. Patricia’s poetry films and essays on videopoetry craft have been featured at FENCE, Poetry Film Live, Atticus Review, and Moving Poems. Her most recent poetry collection, Counterglow, was published by Urban Farmhouse Press (2019), and her poems have appeared in literary journals cream city review, Seneca Review, Quarterly West, The Common, Trampoline, Barzakh, Waxwing and elsewhere. She was Poetry Editor at Passages North from 2015-2022 and recently became a Poetry Editor at FENCE. She is an Associate Professor of English at Northern Michigan University.
Raquel Gutiérrez | Writer
Raquel Gutiérrez is a critic, essayist, poet, performer, and educator. Gutiérrez’s first book Brown Neon (Coffee House Press) was named as one of the best books of 2022 by The New Yorker and listed in The Best Art Books of 2022 by Hyperallergic. Brown Neon was a 2023 Finalist for the Lambda Literary Prize for Best Lesbian Biography/Memoir, a 2023 Finalist for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses’ Firework Award in Creative Nonfiction and Recipient of The Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction. A 2021 recipient of the Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism, as well as a 2017 recipient of the The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, Gutiérrez teaches in the Oregon State University-Cascades Low Residency Creative Writing MFA Program, as well as for The Institute of American Indian Arts’s (IAIA) Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing program. Gutiérrez gets to call Tucson, Arizona home.
Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas | Writer
Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas is the author of Drown Sever Sing from Anomalous press and Don’t Come Back, from Mad Creek Books, as well as the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology The Great American Essay. Her fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translation work has been featured in various journals including The Bellingham Review, The Chicago Review, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Poets & Writers and the Sunday Rumpus, among others. She’s been the recipient of the Best of the Net award and the Iron Horse Review’s Discovered Voices award, she has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and is a Rona Jaffe fellow.
Gabriel Dozal | Writer
Gabriel Dozal is from El Paso, TX and received an MFA in poetry from The University of Arizona. He writes about the borderlands and has work in The Literary Review, Guernica, The Iowa Review, Hunger Mountain, and forthcoming from The Volta.
Cristina Henríquez | Writer
Cristina Henríquez is the author of The Book of Unknown Americans, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2014 and one of Amazon’s 10 Best Books of the Year. It was the Daily Beast Novel of the Year, a Washington Post Notable Book, an NPR Great Read, a Target Book of the Month selection, and was chosen one of the best books of the year by BookPage, Oprah.com, and School Library Journal. It was also longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Henriquez is also the author The World In Half (a novel), and Come Together, Fall Apart: A Novella and Stories, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection. Her forthcoming novel, The Great Divide, about the building of the Panama Canal, will be published in 2024.
Cristina’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Glimmer Train, The American Scholar, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and AGNI, along with the anthology This is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America’s Best Women Writers.
Her non-fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Real Simple, The Oxford American, and Preservation, as well as in the anthologies State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America and Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Women Writers Reflect on the Candidate and What Her Campaign Meant.
CM Burroughs | Writers
CM Burroughs is Associate Professor of Poetry at Columbia College Chicago. She is the author of two collections: The Vital System (Tupelo Press, 2012) and Master Suffering (Tupelo Press, 2020.) Burroughs has been awarded fellowships and grants from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Cave Canem Foundation. She has received commissions from the Studio Museum of Harlem and the Warhol Museum to create poetry in response to art installations. Burroughs’ poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including Poetry magazine, Callaloo, jubilat, Ploughshares, VOLT, Best American Experimental Writing Anthology, and The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks. Burroughs has been a featured reader and has given poetry lectures and writing workshops at institutions and reading series across America and internationally.
Ángel García | Writer, Academic
Ángel García, the proud son of Mexican immigrants, is the author of Teeth Never Sleep, winner of a 2018 CantoMundo Poetry Prize published by the University of Arkansas Press, winner of a 2019 American Book Award, finalist for a 2019 PEN America Open Book Award, and finalist for a 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His work has been published in The American Poetry Review, McSweeney’s, Crab Orchard Review, RHINO, Connotation Press, Tinderbox, Huizache, Miramar, Waxwing, The Acentos Review, The Packinghouse Review, and The Good Men Project among others. He has also received fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Vermont Studio Center, and MacDowell.
Currently, Ángel is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He earned a PhD from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, an M.F.A. from the University of California-Riverside, a B.A. from the University of Redlands, and an A.A. from Long Beach City College. In addition to his creative and academic work, Ángel is also the cofounder of the non-profit organization, Gente Organizada, that works to educate, empower, and engage communities through grassroots organizing.
Xiomara Cornejo | Director, Playwright, Educator
Dr. Xiomara Cornejo (she/her/ella) is a Salvadoran American theater director, and award-winning designer, playwright, dramaturg, as well as educator and scholar from Compton, California. Her professional work includes theater directing, dramaturgy, design, after-school arts programming, applied theater, and community organizing. Her scholarship centers on street and protest theater, radical theater history of the Americas, political puppetry, and circus.
Christopher Soto | Writer
Christopher Soto currently works at UCLA’s Ethnic Studies Research Centers, and he also teaches at UCLA’s Honors College. He has previously taught at NYU where he received his MFA in Poetry and was a Goldwater Hospital Writing Fellow, Columbia University as a June Jordan Teaching Corp Fellow, and at Occidental College as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing. He previously interned with the Poetry Society of America and he served on the Board of Directors with Lambda Literary. He is the editor of Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat Books, 2018) and the author of the limited-print chapbook Sad Girl Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016). He co-founded the Undocupoets Campaign, which successfully lobbied numerous poetry publishers in the United States to remove proof of citizenship requirements from first-book contests. He cofounded Writers for Migrant Justice to protest the detention and separation of migrant families in the U.S. He has also organized with the Cops Off Campus movement and he has worked at Equal Justice USA to end the death penalty. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a CantoMundo Fellowship, the Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism by Split This Rock, and the Barnes & Nobles Writer for Writers Award from Poets & Writers. His poems, reviews, interviews, and articles can be found at New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He identifies as nonbinary and also uses “they” pronouns.
Rocio Cerón | Poet
Rocío Cerón was born in Mexico City in 1972. Her work is experimental, combining poetry with music, performance, and video. Her books of poetry include Basalto (2002), Imperio/Empire (2009, interdisciplinary bilingual edition), Tiento (Germany, 2011), and Diorama (2012). Her poems have been translated into English, Finnish, French, Swedish and German, and she has performed her work at venues in Denmark, England, France, Germany, Sweden, and the United States.
Edgar Garcia | Writer, Poet
Edgar Garcia was born in California to a family of Central American extraction. He earned an associate degree from Chaffey Community College, a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and master’s degrees in English and philosophy, as well as a PhD, from Yale University. He is a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, and works in the fields of indigenous and Latinx studies, American literature, poetry and poetics, and environmental criticism.
His collection of poems and anthropological essays, Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography, won the 2018 Fence Modern Poets Series award. He is also the author of the chapbook Boundary Loot (Punch Press, 2012) and the coeditor of American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (Columbia University Press, 2017). His poems and translations have appeared in the Antioch Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Jacket2, and the anthology The Alteration of Silence: Recent Chilean Poetry (Diálogos, 2013), among other places.
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo | Poet, Essayist, Translator, and Immigration Advocate
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a poet, essayist, translator, and immigration advocate. He is the author of Cenzontle, which was chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy as the winner of the 2017 A. Poulin, Jr. Prize published by BOA editions in 2018, as well as the winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writer Award for poetry, the 2019 Golden Poppy Award from the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, and the Bronze in the FOREWORD INDIE best book of the year. Cenzontle is also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the California Book Award, the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and the Northern California Book Award. Cenzontle was listed among one of NPR’s and the New York Public Library top picks of 2018. His first chapbook, DULCE, won the Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize published by Northwestern University press. His memoir, Children of the Land is forthcoming from Harper Collins in 2020.
Ghayath Almadhoun | Poet
Ghayath Almadhoun is a Palestinian poet who was born in a refugee camp in Damascus in 1979. He studied Arabic literature at the University of Damascus and has worked as a cultural journalist for several Arab-language newspapers. In 2006, he co-founded Bayt-al-Qasid, “The House of Poetry” in Damascus. He is the author of Adrenalin (Action Books, 2017, translated by Catherine Cobham). He has published 4 collections in Arabic and his work has been translated into many languages. With Swedish poet Marie Silkeberg, he has made several poetry films which can be viewed at movingpoems.com. A series of poems by Almadhoun were projected as part of For Aarhus, an installation by Jenny Holzer. He is currently in residence at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.
Craig Santos Perez | Poet
Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru (Chamorro) from the Pacific Island of Guåhan/Guam. He is the co-founder of Ala Press, co-star of the poetry album Undercurrent (Hawai’i Dub Machine, 2011), and author of three collections of poetry: from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008), from unincorporated territory [saina](Omnidawn, 2010), and from unincorporated territory [guma’] (Omnidawn, 2014). He has been a finalist for the LA Times 2010 Book Prize for Poetry and the winner of the 2011 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry.
He is director of the Creative Writing program and an assistant professor of English at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, where he teaches Pacific literature and creative writing. He maintains his own blog, and has blogged for Harriet.
Black/Latinx Colloquium Guests
Jen White-Johnson | Educator & Activist
Jennifer White-Johnson is a disabled and Neurodivergent Afro-Latina art activist and design educator whose visual work aims to uplift disability justice narratives in design. Jen uses photography, zines, and collage art to explore the intersection of content and caregiving, emphasizing redesigning ableist visual culture. Jen has presented her disability justice activist work and collaborated with a number of brands and art spaces across print and digital such as Twitter, Target, Converse, and Apple. Her photo and design work has been featured in The Washington Post, AfroPunk, Art in America, Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation and is permanently archived in libraries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and National Museum of Women in the Arts in DC. and most recently acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. In 2020 she was an honoree on the Diversability’s D-30 Disability Impact List. In 2021 she was listed as one of 20 Latino Artists to watch on Today.com Jen has an MFA in Graphic Design from The Maryland Institute College of Art. She was born in Washington D.C. and lives in Baltimore with her husband Kevin and 10-year-old son Knox.
Julian Randall | Poet, Essayist, Writer
Julian Randall is a Living Queer Black poet from Chicago. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Callaloo, BOAAT and the Watering Hole. Julian is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. Julian is the winner of the 2019 Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from the Publishing Triangle.
His writing has been published in New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and POETRY, and anthologized in Black Boy Joy (which debuted at #1 on the NYT Best Seller list), Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed and Furious Flower.
He has essays in The Atlantic, Vibe Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Ole Miss.
He is the author of Refuse (Pitt, 2018), winner of the 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and a finalist for a 2019 NAACP Image Award, as well as the middle grade novel Pilar Ramirez And The Escape from Zafa (Holt, Winter 2022), and The Dead Don’t Need Reminding: Essays (Bold Type Books, Spring 2023).
He can be found on Twitter @JulianThePoet.
Kristiana Rae Colón | Poet, Playwright, Educator
Kristiana Rae Colón is a poet, playwright, actor, educator, Cave Canem Fellow, creator of #BlackSexMatters and co-director of the #LetUsBreathe Collective. She was awarded 2017 Best Black Playwright by The Black Mall. In 2013, she toured the UK with promised instruments, winner of the inaugural Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize. Kristiana is an alum of the Goodman Theatre’s Playwrights Unit, a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists and one half of the hip-hop duo April Fools. She appeared on the fifth season of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. Kristiana’s writing, producing, and organizing work to radically reimagine power structures, our complicity in them, and visions for liberation.