Radical Poetics & Performance Guests

____________________________________________

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.

• Black Boy Joy
• Refuse

Diego Báez is a writer, educator, and abolitionist. He is the author of Yaguareté White (Univ. Arizona, 2024), a finalist for The Georgia Poetry Prize and a semi-finalist for the Berkshire Prize for Poetry. A recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, the Surge Institute, the Poetry Foundation Incubator for Community-Engaged Poets, and DreamYard’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Diego has served on the boards of the National Book Critics Circle, the International David Foster Wallace Society, and Families Together Cooperative Nursery School. Poems have previously appeared or are forthcoming in Freeman’s, Poetry Northwest, and Latino Poetry: A New Anthology. Book reviews have appeared at Booklist, Harriet, Letras Latinas Blog 2, and The Boston Globe. Essays and other non-fiction have been published in The Georgia Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Diego lives in Chicago and teaches poetry, English composition, and first-year seminars at the City Colleges, where he is an Assistant Professor of Multidisciplinary Studies.

• Yaguareté White

An award-winning poet and translator, Rosa Alcalá has published several books of her own poems as well as translations of poetry by Latin American writers.  YOU, her fourth poetry collection, was published by Coffee House Press in 2024. She has received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant to Artists Award, a Woodberry Poetry Room Creative Fellowship from Harvard, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Translation. Her book Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña was runner-up for the PEN Translation Award. Her poems and translations are featured in publications such as Harper’s, The Nation, American Poetry Review, Poetry, and two volumes of The Best American Poetry. Critical essays on her work appear in American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement; The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of our Time; and The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them. Recently she served as a Guest Editor for the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and is currently a Consulting Editor for the University of Chicago Press’ Phoenix Poets Series. She holds the DeWetter Endowed Chair in Poetry at the University of Texas at El Paso’s Department of Creative Writing and Bilingual MFA Program.

• You

Tilsa Otta (Lima, 1982) is a writer and video artist. She has published four books of poetry, one short story collection, one poetry book for children, and a comic book. In 2020 she published the novel Lxs niñxs de oro de la alquimia sexual. She also directs audiovisual pieces and gives workshops on poetic creation for children and adults.

• The Hormone of Darkness: a playlist

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1957, Martín Espada is the author of more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. A former tenant lawyer in the Greater Boston area’s Latino community, he received a BA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1981 and a JD from Northeastern University in 1985.

Espada published his first poetry collection,The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero (Waterfront Press), in 1982. Among his other books of poetry are Jailbreak of Sparrows (Knopf, 2025); Floaters (W. W. Norton, 2021), which received the National Book Award in Poetry in 2021; Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (W. W. Norton, 2016); The Trouble Ball (W. W. Norton, 2011), which was the recipient of the Milt Kessler Award, a Massachusetts Book Award, and an International Latino Book Award; The Republic of Poetry (W. W. Norton, 2006), which received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; and Imagine the Angels of Bread (W. W. Norton, 1996), winner of an American Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Espada has also published multiple essay collections, including What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Curbstone Books 2, 2019); The Lover of a Subversive Is Also a Subversive (University of Michigan Press, 2010); and edited three anthologies, including Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination (Curbstone, 1994). In 2004, he released a CD of poetry called Now the Dead will Dance the Mambo (Leapfrog).

Espada has received numerous fellowships and awards, including a 2021 Letras Boricuas Fellowship, Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, an Independent Publisher Book Award, an International Latino Book Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 2018, he received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which recognizes distinguished poetic achievement. He is currently a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Gabriel Ramirez is a Queer Afro-Caribbean poet, activist, and teaching artist. A 2023 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry at Adroit Journal. Gabriel has received fellowships from Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Watering Hole, Miami Book Fair, CantoMundo, and Callaloo. Gabriel’s electrifying writing and performance are catalysts towards healing and brings awareness to mental health, Afro-Latinidad, the African Diaspora, self-care, masculinity, and social change.

Gabriel has performed on Broadway at the New Amsterdam Theatre, United Nations, Lincoln Center, Apollo Theatre, and other venues & universities around the nation. Gabriel was featured in Huffington Post, VIBE Magazine, Blavity, and Upworthy. You can find their work in publications like POETRY Magazine, Muzzle Magazine, Adroit Journal,  Split This Rock, and others as well as Bettering American Poetry Anthology (Bettering Books 2017) What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Northwestern University Press 2019) and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT (Haymarket Press 2020)..

Understanding how poetry changed his life as a teenager, Gabriel is dedicated to working with young people and poets ranging from middle schoolers to adults inspiring them to cultivate their voices as writers and performers via coaching, workshops and performances. Gabriel has also received admiration from institutions of higher education and the underserved communities he works in.