¡LA CELEBRATES MACONDO! AWP OFF-SITE READING

 #AWP25: March 26-29, 2025 

Los Angeles Convention Center

 

The AWP Conference & Bookfair is the essential gathering for writers, teachers, students, editors, and publishers. Join thousands of attendees, explore hundreds of events and exhibitors, and immerse in four days of vital literary community and celebration in Los Angeles!

 

 

From  macondowriters.com:

If you plan to attend AWP 2025, please swing by and visit us at Booth #1027, which we are sharing with Women Who Submit. You can find a map of the LA Convention Center here.

 

Also, please join us for a lively, unforgettable evening of readings by Macondistas at the LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes. The night will be filled with poetry, stories, and the spirit of Macondo, accompanied by light refreshments and snacks. Bring your friends and help us celebrate the launch of the workshop's 30th year!

 

Date: Thursday, March 27, 2025

Time: Doors open at 6:00 PM | Event from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM

Location: LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, 501 N. Main St., Los Angeles, California 90012

 

This year, 2025, marks the 30th anniversary of the Macondo Writers Workshop. Stay connected through our website for the latest updates, Macondista news, writer opportunities, and more.

 

The Macondo Writers Workshop is an association of socially-engaged writers working to advance creativity, foster generosity, and serve community. Founded in 1995 by writer Sandra Cisneros and named after the town in Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the workshop gathers writers from all genres who work on geographic, cultural, economic, gender, and spiritual borders.

AWP introduces the Writer to Writer's Fall 2021 Mentors

By Daniel A. Olivas

AWP provides support, advocacy, resources, and community to nearly 50,000 writers, 550 college and university creative writing programs, and 150 writers’ conferences and centers. Its mission is to amplify the voices of writers and the academic programs and organizations that serve them while championing diversity and excellence in creative writing.

AWP celebrates the writers serving as mentors in the Fall 2021 season of the Writer to Writer Mentorship Program. AWP selected 20 mentors for this session based on their experience, their willingness to serve, and the needs prevalent in the mentee applications. Mentors were each given several strong applications to choose from and selected their own mentees.

I am honored and delighted to have been chosen as a mentor for this cohort. My mentee is Lorinda Toledo who is working on her debut novel. Our initial meetings have been very lively and fruitful. She is a talented writer who—no doubt—will complete her novel and get it published. I am so impressed by her tenacity, hard work, and talent.

To learn about the newest mentors, visit here. And to meet the new mentees, go here. 

If you would like to volunteer as a mentor, applications are now being accepted for our sixteenth season, which will begin in February 2022.

AWP: Next Year In SanAnto

Guest Columnist: Pablo Miguel Martínez.
Op-ed piece: AWP 2020 Conference in San Antonio


Every year, approximately 12,000 poets, writers, publishers, and literary scholars gather in major cities in the U.S. and Canada to talk shop at the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). 

During breaks from a schedule brimming with panels and readings—but often lacking in meaningful diversity—conference attendees stroll through a bookfair that draws 800 U.S. and international presses. 

It’s a giddy week if you’re an author, published or hoping to be, for it affords attendees an unparalleled opportunity to network with peers and meet publishers. Like most professional conferences, AWP is by turns exhilarating and exhausting. It is also expensive, especially for under-resourced authors.

The 2020 conference will be held in San Antonio next March. Over the past 20 years, during which I’ve attended the conference semi-regularly, it’s been held in cities like Austin, Boston, Chicago, New York, Seattle, and Washington, DC, all of which boast vibrant literary ecosystems. 

This year it was held in Portland, Oregon, home to Powell’s Books, which bills itself as the world’s largest independent bookstore. 

San Antonio last played host to the gathering in 1980. Much has changed since then. There have been important demographic shifts: Today San Antonio is the country’s largest minority-majority city (there are bigger cities, such as Los Angeles, with large ‘Hispanic’ populations, but those populations are not the majority, as we are here in San Antonio). However, that growth has not yielded the kind of power—economic, political, and otherwise—that generally accompanies majority status. 

Latinas and Latinos, who comprise about 64 percent of San Antonio’s population, bear a disproportionate part of the burden that comes with one of the country’s worst income inequality and economic segregation. 

Arguably, one of the more dispiriting local statistics, and the one perhaps most relevant to a gathering of writers, is San Antonio’s persistent illiteracy: Nearly one-quarter of the local population is illiterate; of that number, about one-half is classified as functionally literate. This explains much: abysmally low voter participation, poor public-school performance, and the pressing need for a larger skilled workforce to meet growing demands, which leads to importing labor from elsewhere, domestical and internationally. 

Little of this matters to most AWP Conference attendees who, if previous gatherings are any indication, will go from the airport to conference hotels to the Henry B. González Convention Center and back. (When he won a 1961 election, González, a San Antonio native, became the first Hispanic American to represent Texas in the U.S. Congress.) 

Those who venture beyond the narrowly circumscribed conference precincts will see traces of sites inhabited by indigenous people for millennia. They’ll see how Spanish missions, built by descendants of those earliest people, set in motion a colonization that still casts a long shadow here. (Or, as a famous African American writer, during a tour of the near-West Side, said plainly: “This is apartheid.”) 

A local friend who traveled to Portland for this year’s conference said a few people asked her if they’d be safe here in San Antonio. How pervasive the effects of the inflammatory, racist—and inaccurate—rhetoric that defines too much of this juncture in U.S. history.

Recently, my excitement over sharing my city with thousands was tempered by several threads in which only one aspect of our city’s diverse realities—based on an outdated misperception—has so far made an impression among online observers and commentators who express an interest in coming to San Antonio next March: affordability.

I’ve been utterly dismayed by comments on social media, many similar to these: “It’s so much cheaper than the coasts” and “It’s far more affordable [than other conference sites]” and “An interesting, delicious, and cheap city.” While this may true to some extent, the comments skim over deeper dismissive and derisive waters. (Because most writers are socially-engaged and curious thinkers, connecting the dots won’t be a challenge: If things here are more affordable than in other conference cities, it’s likely because of low wages earned by hospitality-industry workers, a majority of whom are brown.)

I associate the comments with others I’ve often heard about anything made in Mexico, comments to which I’m acutely sensitive and which drive me to defensiveness. “Made in Mexico” is synonymous with inferior quality, some suggest. “Tell them about Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan and los tres grandes,” my father, indignant, would say. 

Many years ago, during a family trip to Mexico City, my father took us to Bellas Artes to see an art exhibition. I overheard a British tourist whisper to another member of his tour group about the opera house: “You wouldn’t call anything that comes out of there grand.” The easy, often unchallenged denigration. 

These days I fume at the way Mexicans are vilified and dehumanized in political discourse. (The historical precedent for the reviling of Mexicans stretches far back: Walter Prescott Webb, described as one of Texas’s most influential scholars, said that Mexicans, who he deemed inherently violent, have impure blood.) 

It angers me because I see many young people of Mexican descent internalize shame. How else to explain the toxic less-than mentality that manifests itself in ways that are sometimes predictable, sometimes surprising, and always painful? For example, San Antonio is home to one of the country’s largest MLK marches (the largest, by some estimates). This is a beautiful, inspiring fact. 

However, this raza-majority city’s annual observance of civil-rights icon César Chávez is, by comparison, a far smaller event. The self-silencing, together with a willful neglect that is systemic, makes stories, essays, and poems about the lives of Chicanas and Chicanos all the more important, now more than ever.

A few weeks ago, walking along Dolorosa Street (listen to the poetic sorrow in that name!), I saw a young man wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the “Hecho en México” logo. We smiled knowingly at each other. The shirt speaks to a historically-informed ethnic pride that counters the bigoted narrative about all things and people Mexican. It also tells the world that the “affordable” and more brutal label, “cheap,” slapped on Mexico’s exports, be they produce, culture, or, most concerningly, human labor, belie the strength, diversity, and beauty of Mexico and its people, including those of Mexican descent here in San Antonio, once part of Mexico.

At the 2018 AWP Conference, 847—or 53 percent—of a total of 1,591 presenters were white, compared to 143 Latina and Latino presenters, or about nine percent of all presenters. 

If next year’s statistics are comparable, it will be more disturbing, given the backdrop of San Antonio’s demographics. Clearly, AWP must heighten its outreach efforts if its annual gathering is to accurately represent the diverse and ever broadening communities of authors. 

How can any organization credibly claim to serve its constituents’ needs and interests if segments of that constituency are routinely underrepresented in its programming? Conference planning must be a big tent, a big table—a bigness that welcomes and inspires the sort of “insightful dialogue” AWP notes as a hallmark of its annual meeting. 

Given its location, the 2020 conference affords AWP a remarkable opportunity to develop ties to communities of raza writers. For its part, gente can ensure better representation by submitting compelling panel proposals in unprecedented numbers. That means that in the coming weeks, prior to the May 1 submission deadline, those of us who have experience with the submission process should identify ourselves and be generous sources of information to authors for whom this is unfamiliar territory. 

And all attendees should lend their support by attending a Chicanx-focused panel. We should make a concerted effort to buy books by Chicana authors. And to every out-of-town participant: Please consider this a personal invitation to attend an off-site event that features gente.

My father, who was as fiercely proud of his Mexican roots as he was clear-eyed about his American reality, often used the worn adage familiar to many people of color: “You have to be twice as good to get half as much.” San Antonio’s Chicana and Chicano poets and writers are more than twice as good; ‘great’ is an apt description. AWP’s 2020 Conference will be an important platform on which to showcase work that is at once rich and undervalued.

Pablo Miguel Martínez’s literary work, which appears in many publications, has received support from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio, the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture.

Martínez' collection of poems, Brazos, Carry Me, received the 2013 PEN Southwest Book Award for Poetry. He is a Co-Founder of CantoMundo, a national retreat-workshop for Latinx poets.

"Put Your Name On It": Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo on Writing, Submitting, and Honoring Our Creative Work

Olga García Echeverría


Upon Celebrating America’s Birthday

In the morning, I explore the yellow hills

of Chavez Ravine and collect trinkets for my desk:
a hawk feather, a sun-bleached snail shell,
a rusted nail sitting within the brick base
ruins of a house. I imagine great-aunt Susana
collecting herbs from the hills hugging Teocaltiche.
In the afternoon, Uncle Manny recalls remedies
she concocted and the tiny quail eggs she fried
for breakfast with handmade tortillas the shape of boats.
My finicky father never ate from her table,
but Uncle Manny has had too many Budweisers
and is spilling memories of his favorite tia this 4th of July.
“She used to put me on her shoulders and carry me
across the river,” he says dreamily. This was before L.A.,
hair products, Ford cars, and the church youth group
where he met my aunt, and my dad met my mother. 
By dusk, tears dig into the creases of his face
like a stone creek. He hushes only to watch my cousins
launch bottle rockets from the street. Smoke tails up
and sparks shoot out over our heads. Colors flash bright
and disappear into the air like my uncle’s sobriety,
like Tia Susana, like the houses of Chavez Ravine.

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

If you're an Angelino with your eye on the literary scene, then most likely you've heard of Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo. She's shared her award-winning poetry with audiences throughout LA and beyond. She is the creator and curated of the quarterly reading series HITCHED, formerly held at Beyond Baroque and now being hosted at Holy Grounds.

Another important and exciting LA-based literary project is Women Who Submit, which Bermejo co-founded. This group encourages and supports women writers in the submission process for publication. When Xochitl isn't organizing, submitting her work or encouraging others to submit, she's teaching, grading, and reading articles on the pedagogy of working with English language learners.

Despite her busy schedule, Bermejo ekes out writing time, a veces in the afternoon, usually in the evenings, most often on weekends or in the summer when teachers' loads are generally lighter.

Her writing essentials? Música and a laptop. A source of inspiration she keeps returning to? Long walks in nature. 

Although Xochitl says she did not become serious about her writing until her mid-twenties when she pursued her MFA, it is obvious that the creative word has been brewing inside her since she was a chiquilla. At six, she wrote her first poem, and at 11 she not only wrote a western, she also won a Knott's Berry Farm contest with her submission.

Bueno, there is so much to say about Bermejo, but we'll let her say it herself. Here is our featured and estimada poeta sharing her insights on writing, publishing, building community, going beyond AWP drama/trauma, and talking about the importance of following our hearts and honoring our stories.

 

 

Welcome, Xochitl. Let's get right into it. I've been writing a lot about my parents lately, and as a result re-discovering ways in which they influenced my writing. I'm curious, ¿Qué dicen tus padres about you being a poet, and how have they influenced your creative journey?

My parents have always been very supportive of my writing career. I think it is because they are both artists at heart. My mother wanted to be an opera singer, but ended up dropping out of community college when her music teacher didn’t show much interest. She’s told me the story a few times. She was thinking of quitting school and went to tell her teacher and her teacher basically said, “OK.” As a teacher myself, I try to remember this.

As I was growing up, my memories of my dad tend to revolve around images of him in the garage creating objects in his wood-turning workshop. We still have a table he made in those days and my aunt still has the bed he made for her and her husband as a wedding present.

The thing is they were both immigrant children, and they are both the eldest in their families, so they didn’t have the freedom to pursue their artistic dreams. My mom had to take care of her little sister and brothers, and my dad had to go into the army. I think seeing me be a writer brings them joy, and whenever anything good happens, I definitely feel like it’s happening to all of us. 
 
My dad’s number one saying is, “Put your name on it, Mija!” Whenever I come to him with some good news he always says, “That’s good, Mija! Just remember, put your name on it!” To them creating something you are proud of, something you can attach your name to is of high importance.

As a Latina writer, have you always felt free to incorporate Spanish in your creative work?

No, I didn’t always use Spanish in my work. In graduate school, I had little sprinklings of Spanish here and there when I would write about my family, and that was the first time I had people telling me I had to italicize those words. I had never heard that because I hadn’t really studied writing academically before.

It wasn’t until I went to Las Dos Brujas writing retreat in New Mexico that I started to understand the wider conversation of using Spanish and other languages in writing. Las Dos Brujas was organized by Cristina Garcia. The mentors were Cristina, Juan Felipe Herrera, Chris Abani, Denise Chavez, and Kimiko Hahn. LDB was the first time I had ever experienced being in a workshop with a majority of writers of color, and it was the first time I felt I had connected with a mentor of color. 　LDB really opened my eyes to what had already been going on within the community for some time. A book that really struck me was Slow Lightning by Eduardo C. Corral. I was really amazed by how much Spanish he used. Nearly whole poems in Slow Lightning were in Spanish. His book really opened my eyes to how far it can go.

As a teacher myself, I know how difficult it is to write during the school year, especially because we take so much work home.  What helps keep you on track with your writing during the school year?

The best thing I have to keep me writing at this time is a regular workshop group I have on Wednesday nights. There are three of us. We are all women, and we are all workshopping early drafts of novels. We each take turns reading 5-10 pages aloud for feedback. Thankfully, I generated like crazy over the summer, so all I have to do is show up, bring something I’ve already written, and be ready to listen. It feels low-pressure, and it keeps me thinking about writing in the week. And then I have something to work on when the weekend comes. This group has been a life preserver. It’s definitely keeping me afloat writing-wise. 　

　

You were the 2013 Poets & Writers California Writer's Exchange poetry winner. What was that experience like?

It was very exciting. I got an all-expense paid trip to New York to meet with editors, agents, and writers. As a poet, I didn’t really have much connection to meeting the agents, but it was great to hear what they had to say. Some highlights were going into The New Yorker to meet Deborah Treissman, having a glass of wine with Yusef Komunyakaa, and listening to Alice Quinn recite a poem to me. Also, it was pretty amazing to feature at a reading in Manhattan at the Center for Fiction. Some of my oldest friends live in New York, so it was really cool to be able to share that moment with them. It felt good to know I had a loving support team so far from home. It was really special. The whole experience was special. Every night, when I got back to my room, and I was alone for the first time all day, I cried. I couldn’t believe it was happening to me and it was happening to me because of something I wrote. I felt really happy and grateful. 



Photo from Poets & Writer's E-Newsletter 3/14/13:

From left: P&W staff member Jamie FitzGerald, Laura Joyce Davis,

Yusef Komunyakaa, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo,

and P&W Staff member Cathy Linh Che.

Can you briefly share what inspired you to start your HITCHED reading series?

I had gone to a reading at Avenue 50 Studio where Suzanne Lummis invited her students from her classes to feature with her. I liked how she used the reading to bring out new voices, so that was one of the events that inspired me to do a reading series revolved around mentorship. I was also newly out of grad school, and I wanted to promote my friends and other new writers like myself. It was kind of great because we were all newly out of grad school, so we still had close relationships with our mentors, and so I had a bit of a built in talent pool. At the beginning it was a way to get my friends some exposure and to build relationships with the older generation of poets and writers.

You've been hosting this series for the past 5 years. What have been some of the rewards?

 

The rewards have been many. For one, every time there is a HITCHED I walk away feeling moved. I feel a little selfish saying that, like I made this reading strictly for myself, but I hope if I’ve been moved then so have other people. I’ve also had the opportunity to meet so many writers and to introduce writers to the community. The way the reading usually works is I invite someone I know to feature, and then that person invites someone to feature with them. The person they invite can be a mentor, a student, a collaborator, a workshop partner, etc. So nearly every reading, I’m introduced to someone new, and nearly every reading someone is meeting someone new.

 

Have you seen important shifts in the literary scene during these past 5 years?

 

Something that makes me happy is seeing what I think is a bigger push in the last few years to have literature in public spaces. I see it with the Jessica Ceballos and Avenue 50’s Poesia Para la Gente series, with what Iris de Anda is doing with the “Love Corner” in El Sereno, with Liz Gonzalez’s new Uptown Word Reading Series in Long Beach, and with the Los Angeles Lit Crawl. I think this is important work.

And you'll be reading at Lit Crawl,  on October 21 with Women Who Submit. Here's the link to your event:

http://litcrawl.org/la/events/between-stage-and-page-interstitial-arts-foundation/

 

On the issue of submission: one thing is creating and another is getting our work out there. Alyss Dixson, Ashaki Jackson and you took a lead a few years ago in encouraging women writers (and in particular women of color) to submit. Can you tell us a little about starting up Women Who Submit? :

 

Women Who Submit came out of the first VIDA count. The women of VIDA started counting the number of women and men published in top tier journals like The New Yorker and Paris Review. What they found was that there was a large disparity between men and women being represented in these magazines. When editors were asked why they thought there was this disparity, the most common response was, "Women don't submit as often as men."

Women Who Submit was created in an attempt to change the rhetoric. The idea of submission parties, getting a group of women together to submit work and act as a support, came from Alyss Dixson. She invited Ashaki Jackson to work on this idea with her, and Ashaki invited me to work with the two of them. I didn’t even know about VIDA until I was brought into this project in 2011. Together we planned our first submission party. It was at my mom’s house, which I thought was great. For the first few years, it was a small group of women meeting in each other’s houses about 5 times a year, but over the last year we’ve become more global. We now have monthly submission parties with submission parties open to the public and new members every other month. We’ve also started doing panels, readings, and workshops. It is definitely growing, which is really exciting!

 

I've yet to go to a WWS meeting myself, but I want to share that I feel encouraged by WWS from afar. WWS has, on several occasions, inspired me to send something out, so gracias! Here's the link to WWS in case readers want to find out more: : https://womenwhosubmitlit.wordpress.com/

That’s amazing! I’m glad we could inspire you to submit. Not everyone can come to an event, but if women find some strength and support for submitting from our online presence, then that makes us happy. We are trying to create a supportive community online with our Facebook, twitter, and blog. We want women to know they can always come to these parties for encouragement, information, and support.

Finding a “home” for a literary piece can be challenging, especially when we are bilingual and write in mixed languages. There is always so much negotiation (between the self and the page) that happens prior to sending something out. Should I even send this there? If I do send it out and it's not a Latino journal, how much of the Spanish do I have to take out? etc. What advice can you give women writers out there who are grappling with some of these issues and questions?

I think my advice would be to make the best piece you possibly can, and try not to worry about who will take it. I know this is hard. I’m trying to do it right now with a YA novel I’m working on. My heroine is the daughter of migrant farm workers, and I’m always thinking, Is that too much Spanish? But I think we have to fight to stay true to who we are, and fight to stay true to the piece. Each piece is different and there is never one answer.
 

What I hope other poets do is write their hearts out, and make something that makes them proud, something they are proud to have their names on (like my father says), and then send it out. If you do that, I think you will find the right home for your work. I have an essay up at The James Franco Review right now where large chunks of dialogue are in Spanish. http://thejamesfrancoreview.com/2015/08/26/non-fiction-by-xochitl-julisa-bermejo/
I definitely worried no one would take it, but then I found out about The James Franco Review. Based off of their mission and the work they had previously published I thought, if anyone is going to take a chance on this piece it’s this place. And then they did, which was amazing! So I think being true to yourself, and looking for those places who are open to what you are doing is key.

I think that even when we do make efforts to submit, though, it can be pretty discouraging, and it can also be expensive. Although it's exciting to see more people of color presses and journals, it's still a very White and very male-dominated literary world. We've made many gains, but the racism is institutionalized.

This is true, but we have to keep pushing ourselves into these spaces. I spent a month this summer at a residency that was very white, and it wasn’t always comfortable, but as one mujer told me recently, “So what’s our option? To not go? No!” Being there made it possible to finally write a first draft of a book I’ve had in my mind for years, so no, we can’t stop doing it. But this is something I’ve been thinking about with Women Who Submit. We want to support women trying to move up into these prestigious spaces, which tend to be white and male. I’m curious about what we can do to help arm them before they go. I’m curious to figure out how we can support them from afar.
 

Money is also a big issue. To apply for prestigious awards and accolades is not cheap. Reading fees and application fees are no joke, and it only helps keep the writing world classist. One dream I have is to start some kind of scholarship fund just for application fees. If we could help women submit their work to places they normally wouldn’t because of fees and financial concerns, that would be huge.

Speaking of institutionalized racism and the need for more diversity in the literary world, you wrote a great blog on your recent experience with Red Hen Press, "Kate Gale, Red Hen, and What Poetry and Community Mean to Me." To quickly recap, in August you received a letter from Red Hen stating they were interested in publishing your poetry manuscript. In your blog, you shared that this was a dream come true, and yet it was quickly followed by that horrific Huffington Post blog by Kate Gale, “AWP is Us.” There was such a huge outcry in response to to Kate Gale's blog because it offended so many--the LGBTQ community, writers of color, writers with disabilities, and I think in general just writers with consciousness. Because of Gale's affiliations with Red Hen Press, you then made the difficult decision of not publishing with them. I imagine that must have felt both empowering and heartbreaking.

The decision not to publish was heartbreaking. Writing about the decision not to publish was empowering. Making the decision to make the blog piece public was frightening. Kate Gale’s article came out on Monday. I wrote the blog on Wednesday night and sent it off to two friends for feedback with the question, Can I really do this? I revised it Thursday night and didn’t sleep at all that night. Then first thing Friday morning, I decided if I didn’t do it right at that moment, I would never do it, so I did. My hands were shaking. Then Facebook kind of exploded, and the outpouring of support was just amazing. All day long, I kept crying mostly because people were being so supportive and writing beautiful messages to me. I didn’t expect that. It was a reminder that our poetry community can be a really good place. We can’t let the Kate Gales and Michael Derrick Hudsons of the world try to distort it. We have to be vigilant in speaking out, speaking our truths, and telling our stories.

You wrote in your blog, “'AWP is US' reminded me why I write poetry in the first place. Because privileged, white America isn’t going to tell my story, or the stories of those around me. Because writing poetry is my way of claiming space in a world that wants to push me out of the way. Because writing poetry gives me the power to create and build the world I want to see.” I think these words strike a cord with so many of us.

Thank you for that. I think this was what resonated with many people who reached out to me. In all of this I only had one negative commenter (which is kind of unheard of), and this person said, “In fact, Red Hen was going to tell your story–you just opted out because, like some others, you chose to interpret Gale’s piece very narrowly, reducing her to a stereotype.” But this misses the point. Writers of color and women writers, have to be careful. Of course, we all want to be published, and we want credibility and professional accolades. And for those who choose to pursue tenure tracks, getting published by top tier journals and presses is a necessity, but we also have to feel good about where our work lands. It’s our one major commodity, and we have to handle our publishing decisions with care.

I love that you turned that situation around. It's usually the publisher who has the power to say, “No,” but in this case you took that power back into your own hands and ultimately denied them the opportunity to publish your work.

Speaking of your work, can you briefly share what your manuscript, Built With Safe Spaces, is about?

Built with Safe Spaces is a collection of poetry inspired by Los Angeles, my grandmother, and the Arizona-Mexico border where I volunteered as a desert aid worker in the summers of 2011 and 2013. By traveling from the green hills of Los Angeles to the jagged canyons of the Sonoran desert, it is my hope these poems illustrate a speaker driven to activism by a need to honor her family's journey as Mexican immigrants. 　

I have no doubt your manuscript will get picked up soon by a great publisher. I look forward to reading it, and of course, we want to review it here at La Bloga as soon as it comes out.

Thank you! I’ve been losing faith lately, so your words mean so much to me. I’ve often daydreamed about the book, and how it will feel in my hands, and how my name, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, will look across the bottom of the cover, but I haven’t been dreaming about that too much lately. I’m more excited about my new novel these days. The novel is where most of my energy has been going, but I hope one day soon, I’ll have both, and that will be an amazing day!

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the 2013 poetry winner of the Poets& Writers California Writers Exchange. She has work published in American Poetry Review, CALYX, Acentos Review, Los Angeles Review, and The Nervous Breakdown. A short dramatization of her poem "Our Lady of the Water Gallons," directed by Chicano activist and Hollywood director, Jesús Salvador Treviño can be viewed at






https://xochitljulisa.wordpress.com/

https://womenwhosubmitlit.wordpress.com/

https://twitter.com/WomenWhoSubmit

https://xochitljulisa.wordpress.com/category/hitched/

http://www.labloga.blogspot.com/2015/03/hitched-moves-to-east-side.html

http://labloga.blogspot.com/2012/12/xochitl-julisa-bermejos-road-to-winning.html

http://thejamesfrancoreview.com/2015/08/26/non-fiction-by-xochitl-julisa-bermejo/

http://litcrawl.org/la/events/between-stage-and-page-interstitial-arts-foundation/

CON TINTA AWP MINNEAPOLIS 2015: LA PACHANGA & AWARD CEREMONY

Xánath Caraza

 

Con Tinta

 

For the 2015 Pachanga & Award Ceremony in Minneapolis, MN, who will be honored?  When and where will our event take place?  How can you help?  The Advisory Circle of Con Tinta, a collective of Chican@/Latin@ Activist Writers, Mouthfeel Press and S&Q are honoring Ray Gonzalez for his decades of literary achievements.
 

Ray Gonzalez

With regard for when and where the event will take place, on Friday, April 10, 2015, 2 – 3:30 p.m., we will have La Pachanga at Bryant Lake Bowl (Restaurant, Bowl and Theater) 810 W. Lake St., Minneapolis, MN, 55408-2846, (612) 825-3737.  Please be our guest and join La Pachanga for our hors d’oeuvre & cash bar celebration and more. Doors will be open at 1:30 p.m. to start our annual Pachanga and Award Ceremony at 2 p.m. and celebrate Ray Gonzalez.  Bryant Lake Bowl is 6 minutes away (2.63 miles) by taxi from the Convention Center.  Click here for directions. 

For our event, you can help. There is a fundraising campaign to finance our Pachanga and Award Ceremony prior to the event. The Con Tinta advisory board is accepting donations for La Pachanga 2015. Your donations are key to make this event possible and celebrate our autores.  Your name and/or your organization will be recognized in the program of La Pachanga and will be also acknowledged during the event itself.  See the Donation section below for more information about how to support celebrating one of our grandes autores.  Thank you all for your support and as usual: Are you ready for La Pachanga 2015 in Minneapolis, MN? Join us. 

Many thanks go out to those collaborating on our Con Tinta Advisory Board for our Pachanga and Award Ceremony 2015 to take place.  Thank you Diana Pando, Irasema González, Eduardo Corral, María M. Maloney, Ruben Quesada, Natalia Treviño and Xánath Caraza.

 

Ray Gonzalez

 

Ray Gonzalez

 

Ray Gonzalez is the author of fifteen books of poetry, including six from BOA Editions--The Heat of Arrivals (1997 PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award), Cabato Sentora (2000 Minnesota Book Award Finalist), The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande (winner of a 2003 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry), Consideration of the Guitar: New and Selected Poems (2005), Cool Auditor: Prose Poems (2009), and Beautiful Wall, 2015.   The University of Arizona Press has published eight books, including Turtle Pictures (Arizona, 2000), a mixed-genre text, which received the 2001 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry and the recent Soul Over Lightning (2014), a finalist for a 2015 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry.  His poems have appeared in the 1999, 2000, 2003 and 2014 editions of The Best American Poetry (Scribners) and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses 2000 (Pushcart Press).  He is the author of three collections of essays, The Underground Heart:  A Return to a Hidden Landscape (Arizona, 2002), which received the 2003 Carr P. Collins/ Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best Book of Non-fiction,  Memory Fever (University of Arizona Press, 1999), and Renaming the Earth: Personal Essays (Arizona, 2008).  He has written two collections of short stories, The Ghost of John Wayne (Arizona, 2001, winner of a 2002 Western Heritage Award for Best Short Story and a 2002 Latino Heritage Award in Literature) and Circling the Tortilla Dragon (Creative Arts, 2002).   He is the editor of twelve anthologies, most recently Sudden Fiction Latino:  Short Short Stories from the U.S. and Latin America (W.W. Norton).  He has served as Poetry Editor of The Bloomsbury Review for thirty-five years and, in 1998, founded LUNA, a poetry journal, which received a Fund for Poetry grant for Excellence in Publishing.  He was awarded a 2002 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southwest Border Regional Library Association.  He is a Professor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at The University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. 

 

HOW TO DONATE FOR La Pachanga & Award Ceremony 2015

A. If you do not want to create a Paypal account, and you prefer to send a check, send a check via snail mail to:

 

Natalia Trevino

PO Box 1054

Helotes, Texas 78023

 

B. If you want to pay electronically, go to PayPal.com

C. Select “Send” on home page of PayPal.com

D. Enter contintaletrasaward@gmail.com and the amount you wish to donate.

E. Choose “This is for friends or family.”

F. Sing up for an account. It is free.  Enter the information from either your bank or your credit card that you will use to make payments for all paypal transactions.

G. Confirm “I’m sending to family or friends.”  If you use a bank, there is no charge.  If you use a credit card, there is a 2.9% charge to Con Tinta.

H. Select “Continue”.

I. Review your payment amount.

J. Under Email to recipient, enter “Continta” or “Donation” in the Subject line.

K. Confirm by selecting “Send Money.”

L. That should be it!

 

Call Natalia Treviño at (210)264-3514 if you have any questions or problems sending money.

 

Poster for the 2015 Pachanga

 

 

 

 

 

 

AWP Panels and Readings With Macondo Members

The Macondo Foundation works with dedicated and compassionate writers who view their work and talents as part of a larger task of community-building and non-violent social change. We are poets, novelists, journalists, performance artists, and creative writers of all genres whose work is socially-engaged. What unites us is a commitment to serve our under-served communities through our writing.
www.macondofoundation.org

 

Thursday- March 1, 2012

12:00 Noon- 1:15 P.M. Lake Ontario, Hilton Chicago, 8th Floor
Taking Up Residence: Writers in Unexpected Places
(Wendy Call, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Henry Reese, Ellen Placey Wadey)
Five writers will share their experiences as writers in residence at K-12 schools, visual arts centers, libraries, county hospitals, battered women’s shelters, national parks, and urban community centers nationwide. Each will reflect on what it means to be a writer in a community of nonprofessional writers—and how that community changes both what is written and the writer. Panelists will discuss the practicalities of finding, creating, and making the most of writer-in-residence opportunities.

1:30 P.M.-2:45 P.M.
Wabash Room, Palmer House Hilton, 3rd Floor
Modernist Nonfiction: Virginia Woolf and Her Contemporaries
(Tracy Seeley, Joy Castro, Marcia Aldrich, Jocelyn Bartkevicius)
Did Virginia Woolf create the lyric essay? What else did modernists write that we might think of as creative nonfiction? And what can they teach us about this varied and plastic genre? Join this panel of nonfiction writers as we explore Woolf’s essays, Louise Bogan’s fragmented memoir, Alice Meynell’s personal essays, Margery Latimer’s manifesto/ars poetica, and Meridel LeSueur’s labor movement reportage.


3:00 P.M.-4:15 P.M.
Red Lacquer Room, Palmer House Hilton, 4th Floor
Indigenous Editing/Publishing: Journals, Anthologies, and Presses
(Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui, Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano, Janet McAdams, Brandy Nālani McDougall)
Indigenous publishing plays a vital role in sovereignty and decolonization movements. Queer and womanist editors of Indigenous Pacific, Native North American, and Indigenous Latin American descent will discuss the production and maintenance of Native journals, anthologies, and presses. Collaboratively producing Native texts, the panel will discuss how they negotiate economic, logistical, and institutional challenges, while keeping center issues of culture, politics, aesthetics, and diversity.


7pm-10pm
"Ancestors: A Queer Writers of Color Reading"
sponsored by the Lambda Literary Foundation
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/

Center on Halsted
3rd Floor
Irving Harris Family Foundation Reception Hall
3656 N. Halsted St. (at Waveland Ave.)
Chicago, IL 60613
(773) 472-6469


7pm Doors Open
7:30pm Reading

Organized by Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán
& Tony Valenzuela

Readers:
OluSeyi OluToyin Adebanjo, Nancy Agabian, Ryka Aoki, Tamiko Beyer, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, Ching-In Chen, Matthew R. K. Haynes-Kekahuna, Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano, David Keali'i, Emil Keliane, Janet McAdams, Deborah A. Miranda, Claudia Narváez-Meza, vaimoana litia makakaufaki niumeitolu, Emma Pérez, Jai Arun Ravine, Charles Rice-González, James Thomas Stevens, D. Antwan Stewart, Max Wolf Valerio, & Jennifer Lisa Vest.

"Ancestors: A Queer Writers of Color Reading" is a literary reading featuring same-gender-loving, multiple-gender-loving, and transgender poets, non/fiction writers, filmmakers, and performance artists of Indigenous Pacific, Native North American, Arab/Middle Eastern, Asian, Latina/o, and African descent.

This event is sponsored by the Lambda Literary Foundation, which nurtures, celebrates, and preserves lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) literature through programs that honor excellence, promote visibility, and encourage development of emerging writers.

Friday- March 2, 2012

3:00 P.M.-4:15 P.M.
Joliet, Hilton Chicago, 3rd Floor
Bridging the Gaps of Race, Gender, and Culture in Children’s and Young Adult Literature
(Kekla Magoon, René Colato Laínez, Debby Dahl Edwardson, Bridget Birdsall)
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Caucasians will be a minority in the U.S. by the year 2020. The new multiracial face of America is bridging cultural divides on many levels and embracing a brave new world where geeks, freaks, and queers can likewise no longer be hidden in literary closets. As reading rates decline, children’s writers are uniquely poised to promote a literature that better acknowledges who we are becoming. This panel will help writers give voice to the other in a meaningful way.

3:00 P.M.-4:15 P.M.
Grand Ballroom, Hilton Chicago, 2nd Floor
A Reading and Conversation with Luis J. Rodriguez and Dagoberto Gilb, Sponsored by Macondo Writers’ Workshop
(John Phillip Santos, Luis J. Rodriguez, Dagoberto Gilb)
The event will be a reading of selected and new works by two of the most important American writers reflecting on the experiences and story tradition of the Latino community. Both Luis J. Rodriguez and Dagoberto Glib are also involved in innovative initiatives in creative writing education and community efforts committed to positive social change. Question and answer with discussion will follow.

Saturday- March 3, 2012

9:00 A.M.-10:15 A.M.
Crystal Room, Palmer House Hilton, 3rd Floor
Building and Surviving an Innovative Writing Program
(K. Lorraine Graham, John Pluecker, Anna Joy Springer, Jen Hofer, Mark Wallace)
Participating in an interdisciplinary writing program committed to innovative pedagogies is exhilarating and confusing, especially if it’s a new program and you are a professor building the curriculum or a student in the inaugural class. A recent graduate, a current student, two tenured faculty members, and an adjunct professor discuss their experiences with innovative writing programs: the three-year old MFA at UCSD, the established MFA at Cal Arts, and the growing undergraduate BA at CSU San Marcos.

9:00 A.M.-10:15 A.M.
Honoré Ballroom, Palmer House Hilton, Lobby Level
Queer Poets of Color on Craft: The Art of Decolonization
(Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, Samiya Bashir, Deborah A. Miranda, Ching-In Chen, Tamiko Beyer)
There is power in craft. Poets use craft to create possibility, ways of seeing, hearing, and moving the world, re-envisioning it. Queer poets of color use multiple techniques to shape language on the page and stage, the way words flicker across glowing screens and beat against the drums of our ears. From the generation and arrangement of text, to shifts in narrativity and delivery, to the use of multiple registers and media, this panel explores the decolonial power of skillful wor(l)d-weaving.

3:00 P.M.-4:15 P.M.
Lake Huron, Hilton Chicago, 8th Floor
Migrant Voices in the Latino Heartland: The Latino Writers Collective’s Migrant Youth Writers Workshop
(Miguel M. Morales, Jose Faus, Gabriela N. Lemmons, Jason Sierra, Linda Rodriguez)
Latino Writers Collective members, including former migrant youth, youth advocates, and students, lead a learning circle on their groundbreaking Migrant Youth Writers workshop, now in its fourth year. Learn how the Latino Writers Collective collaborates with local agencies, colleges and universities in the Midwest. Discover how the workshop helps youth identify and nurture their long silenced voices as migrant youth in the Heartland. Recognize simple ways you can help.

3:00 P.M.-4:15 P.M.
Boulevard Room A,B,C, Hilton Chicago, 2nd Floor
An MFA, huh? What Are You Gonna Do with That?
(Beth Snyder, Sara Hess, Gerald Richards, Bridget Boland Foley, Shin Yu Pai)
What career options exist for a newly minted MFA—besides the obvious paths of more graduate school, adjunct limbo, or literary superstardom? Twelve years later, five alumni of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s MFA in Writing talk about alternative career paths in education, nonprofit, TV, and other spheres—and how their MFA helped them get there.