Your daily dose of Chicano poetry
"I write poems on walls that crumble and fall
I talk to shadows that sleep and go away crying.”
Luis Omar Salinas (1937–2008)
Award-Winning Argentine Singer Mercedes Sosa Dies at 74
Angela de Hoyos, grande dame of Chicano poetry, dies in S.A.
By Elaine Ayala at The Express-News
She’s credited with mentoring poets such as San Antonio’s Carmen Tafolla. During a visit to San Antonio, Rudolfo Anaya, author of the Chicano classic, “Bless Me, Ultima,” praised de Hoyos contributions to the canon.
Funeral arrangements are pending. Look for an obituary in the Sunday The Express-News.
Two poems by Angela de Hoyos
Woman, Woman
climb up
that ladder
bring down
the moon
or she
will tattle
tattle falsehood
in the skies
(and who
can tell
the truth
from lies?)
that it
is you
forever Eve
who rules
mere man
without reprieve
The Final Laugh
On an empty stomach,
with the pang of mendicant yesterdays
I greet my reflection
in the dark mirror of dusk.
What do the entrails know
about the necessity of being white
–the advisability of mail-order parents?
Or this wearing in mock defiance
the thin rag of ethnic pride,
saying to shivering flesh and grumbling belly:
Patience, O companions of my dignity?
Perhaps someday I shall accustom myself
to this: my hand held out
in eternal supplication: being content
with the left-overs of a greedy establishment.
Or – who knows? – perhaps tomorrow
I shall burst these shackles
and rising to my natural full height
fling the final parting laugh
O gluttonous omnipotent alien white world.
(Diploma Di Benemerenza, 1972
Accademia L. Da Vinci, Rome, Italy)
Angela de Hoyos takes on the tasks of bearing witness, and denouncing the imperative social demands that are inescapable. In the poems she writes, she comes face to face with herself and the world that surrounds her. Arise, Chicano! is Angela’s first published collection of poems
Happening at Resistencia
En el corazon del South Austin tenemos un love for liberation! c/s
Red Salmon Arts Calendar September/October/November 2009
Sunday Sept. 27, 2009 . . . CANCELED.
A public reading & signing by Ana Castillo & Co.
5pm Saturday October 3, 2009
Red Salmon Arts presents a reading and chapbook signing
with Native American poet and short story writer
Joe Montoya (Albuquerque, NM)
author of Children of the Desert Mountains
(A joint Red CalacArts Publications & Red Salmon Press onda)
Winner of the 2009 raúlrsalinas Guerilla Chapbook Poetry Contest
with special guest:
cover artist Gerardo Quetzatl Garcia (San Antonio)
Vernon “Joe” Montoya was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and raised on the Santa Ana and San Felipe Pueblos. As a young adult he was incarcerated on drug offences and used his time in prison to read and write poetry. He is a proud father of two daughters and two sons. Joe has won several poetry slam competitions and is currently working on his first full book of poetry. He reads, lectures and facilitates literary workshops in jails, prisons, juvenile facilities, middle and high schools. He is also a full-time undergraduate student in Criminology at the University of New Mexico in Alburquerque and a full time employee at Five Sandoval Indian Pueblos, Inc., part of their Behavioral Health Team as a Certified Prevention Specialist that focuses on alcohol, tobacco and drug abuse prevention among adolescents in his community.
The raulrsalinas Guerrilla Chapbook Poetry Contest and the Children of the Desert Mountains Chapbook Release Reading are supported in part by the Ford Foundation, JP Morgan Chase, and Southwest Airlines through a grant from the NALAC Fund for the Arts. For more info http://www.nalac.org.
7pm Thursday October 8, 2009
Red Salmon Arts presents
a reading & book signing with Thomas Glave
Author of The Torturer’s Wife (City Lights Books)
Nominated for the 2010 Stonewall Book Award,
the oldest book award given for outstanding achievement in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Literature
Author of the acclaimed story collection Whose Song?, award-winning Thomas Glave is known for his stylistic brio and courageous explorations into the heavily mined territories of race and sexuality. In The Torturer’s Wife, he expands and deepens his lyrical experimentation in stories that focus—explicitly and allegorically—on the horrors of dictatorships, war, anti-gay violence, the weight of traumatized memory, secret fetishes, erotic longing, desire and intimacy.
Thomas Glave is an O. Henry award-winning author and was named a Village Voice Writer on the Verge in 2001. He is the author of Whose Song? and Other Stories, Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent (winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction), and editor of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles. He is the 2008-2009 Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Thomas Glave walks the path of such greats in American literature as Richard Wright and James Baldwin . . . He cuts to the bone of what it means to be black in America, white in America, gay in America, and human in the world at large.” —Gloria Naylor, author of The Women of Brewster Place
Red Salmon Arts presents:
Chicana Lives and Criminal Justice: Voices from El Barrio:
Lecture, Book Signing, & Performance with scholar/activist Juanita Díaz-Cotto
(Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Area Studies Program at SUNY-Binghamton)
6:30pm Tuesday, October 27, 2009
UT Austin Community Engagement Center, 1009 E. 11th St.
Red Salmon Arts presents a lecture and book signing on
Chicana Lives and Criminal Justice: Voices from El Barrio (UT Press) with Juanita Diaz-Cotto
This first comprehensive study of Chicanas encountering the U.S. criminal justice system is set within the context of the international war on drugs as witnessed at street level in Chicana/o barrios. Chicana Lives and Criminal Justice uses oral history to chronicle the lives of twenty-four Chicana pintas (prisoners/former prisoners) repeatedly arrested and incarcerated for non-violent, low-level economic and drug-related crimes. It also provides the first documentation of the thirty-four-year history of Sybil Brand Institute, Los Angeles’ former women’s jail. Through her oral histories, Dr. Díaz-Cotto has given women who rarely have a voice—either in their own communities or in academic literature—an opportunity to tell their stories on their own terms. Their reflections are haunting and deeply affecting. Dr. Díaz-Cotto specializes in grounding the experiences of Chicanas and female prisoners in the everyday, lived experiences of women across America.
Xican@ Poetry Daily 