Reading and Launch of Nepantla, an Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color
Event Overview
Location
Wallace Theater, Lewis Arts complex
FREE and open to public
Tuesday, May 1, 2018
RECEPTION AND BOOK SALE 4 PM Forum, Lewis Arts complex
READING 4:30 PM Wallace Theater, Lewis Arts complex FREE and open to public
Princeton Arts Fellow Erika Sánchez hosts a reading by poets Natalie Diaz, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Christopher Soto in celebration of the launch of Nepantla, the first anthology in the English language that spans approximately 100 years of queer poets of color, from the Harlem Renaissance until the present, including work by Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Erika Sánchez, Natalie Diaz, and Eduardo C. Corral. The reception and reading are free and open to the public.
ABOUT THE POETS
NATALIE DIAZ was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press. She is a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, and a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, as well as being awarded a US Artists Ford Fellowship. Diaz teaches at the Arizona State University Creative Writing MFA program. She splits her time between the east coast and Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she works to revitalize the Mojave language.
DAWN LUNDY MARTIN is a poet, essayist, and conceptual-video artist. She is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House, 2017); Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2015), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE (Nightboat Books, 2011), A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007), and three limited edition chapbooks. Her nonfiction can be found in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and elsewhere. In 2018 she won the NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in Prose. Martin is Professor of English in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and Co-director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.
2017-19 Princeton Arts Fellow Erika L. Sánchez. Photo by Robyn Lindeman
ERIKA L. SÁNCHEZ is a 2017-19 Princeton Arts Fellow. She is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. A poet, novelist, and essayist living in Chicago, her debut poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, was published by Graywolf in summer 2017, and her debut young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, was released by Knopf Books for Young Readers in fall 2017. Sanchez’ poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many prestigious literary journals, including Pleiades, Hunger Mountain, Crab Orchard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ostrich Review, Copper Nickel, Vinyl Poetry, Guernica, diode, Boston Review, ESPN.com, the Paris Review, Gulf Coast, and POETRY Magazine. Her poetry has also been featured on “Latino USA” on NPR and published in Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Viking 2015).
CHRISTOPHER SOTO (b. 1991, Los Angeles) is a poet based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of Sad Girl Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016) and the editor of Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat Books, 2018). He cofounded the Undocupoets Campaign and worked with Amazon Literary Partnerships to establish grants for undocumented writers. In 2017, he was awarded “The Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism” by Split This Rock and he was invited to teach a “Poetry and Protest Movements” course at Columbia University, as part of the June Jordan Teaching Corp. In 2016, Poets & Writers honored Christopher Soto with the “Barnes & Nobles Writer for Writers Award.” He frequently writes book reviews for the Lambda Literary Foundation. His poems, reviews, interviews, and articles can be found at The Nation, The Guardian, The Advocate, Los Angeles Review of Books, American Poetry Review, Tin House, and more. His work has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Thai. He has been invited to speak at university campuses across the country. He is currently working on a full-length poetry manuscript about police violence and mass incarceration. He received his MFA in poetry from NYU, where he was a Goldwater Hospital Writing Workshop Fellow.