Kadiri Vaquer Fernandez
Kadiri Vaquer Fernández is a Puerto Rican poet, translator and educator living in the Monterey Bay area. She holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from NYU, and a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese from Vanderbilt University. She has published two collections of poetry, Andamiaje and Ritos de pasaje, and she translated the anthology Literary Works by 10 Dominican Women. She is currently working on a memoir in poetic prose. As an educator, Kadiri has taught Spanish, creative writing, Caribbean and Latin American literature, and courses on gender, feminism, and queer studies. Her poetry and research have been included in anthologies, literary magazines and academic journals in Puerto Rico, Spain, and the U.S.
Leading Workshop A: "Escribir sobre los amuletos/Writing About Amulets"
(Break-out Session #1--11:00 to 12:00)
In this workshop, writers will be encouraged to reflect on objects like keepsakes, souvenirs, amulets, or lucky charms, how we rely on them for different purposes, and how these artifacts are connected to personal narratives or memories. This workshop is open to anyone, established or aspiring writer, but is especially meant to motivate individuals wanting to tell a story (through prose or verse) that is particularly challenging.
Odilia Galván Rodríguez
Odilia Galván Rodríguez is a poet, writer, editor, and activist. She is the author of six volumes of poetry. Her latest, The Color of Light, (FlowerSong Books, 2019) is an extensive collection of chronicles and poetry honoring the Mexica (Aztec) and Orisha (Yorùbá) Energies, which she worked on during her time living in Cuba and Mexico. Also, along with the late Francisco X. Alarcón, she edited the award-winning anthology Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice (University of Arizona Press, 2016). Galván Rodríguez has worked as an editor for various print media such as Matrix Women’s News Magazine, Community Mural’s Magazine, and Tricontinental Magazine in Havana, Cuba. She is currently the editor of Cloud Women’s Quarterly Journal online and facilitates creative writing workshops nationally. As an activist she’s worked for the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO and the East Bay Institute for Urban Arts, has served on numerous boards and commissions, and is currently active in women’s organizations whose mission it is to educate around environmental justice issues and disseminate an indigenous worldview regarding the earth and people’s custodial relationship to it.
Leading Workshop B, Parts 1 & 2: "Decolonizing Our Writing: Discussion & Writing"
(Break-out Sessions #1 & #2; even though workshops B continues through both sessions, each part offers a unique program and can stand alone. You can take both parts or just one! )
In working towards decolonizing our writing, we must witness how our voices were stifled and or silenced over our lifetime. In and of themselves, these acts of silencing and erasure are traumatic events that happened to us personally and to our family and community members. Even when we’ve censored ourselves or chose not to use our native tongues out of shame or fear of retribution, that too is the effect of colonization.
In this workshop, through free-writing, we will explore ways to reincorporate our ways of speaking, telling stories, code-switching, and writing in the languages of our ancestors. We may have lost some of our indigenous languages; however, we may begin to remember them by writing freely without worrying about the audience or the gatekeepers.
Aideed Medina
Aideed Medina is a bilingual poet and spoken word artist. She is a UC CNP Certified California Naturalist and practices flor y canto as part of her poetic process and exploration of California's natural history.
Her work has appeared in: Fresno State's Club Austral Literary Magazine, Chicano Writers and Artists Association Journal, La Bloga, Poets Responding, Art of the Commune, Split This Rock, Nueva York Poetry Review, Di-Lirio Revista Literaria, as part of a collection of original art songs composed for The Opera Remix, Fresno Grand Opera.
Co-leading Workshop C with Carla Schick: "Now Serving Poetry--A Meal in Community Part 1"
(Break-out Session #1--11:00 to 12:00)
How to Find a Poem in a Sandia
How to find poetry in the natural world through floricanto. In digesting a Sandia, how do we find the poem within? How does the bocadillo inspire the thought? You're drinking from the water that was rained into the soil, becoming in touch with the roots of the soil, and thus with your own roots. it’s a very basic meditation. In this exercise, I want you to think first of holding: is it a watermelon, is it a peach, is it an elote? What are you reaching for when you’re hungry?
Carla Schick
Carla Schick is a queer activist, retired teacher, and a lover of language & jazz (as food for the soul). They have been published in Milvia St., Forum Literary Magazine, Earth’s Daughters and online at The Write Launch & A Gathering of the Tribes. Carla received their Certificate in poetry from Berkeley City College.
Co-leading Workshop C with Aideed Medina: "Now Serving Poetry--A Meal in Community Part 1"
(Break-out Session #1--11:00 to 12:00)
You’re Gonna Need a Recipe for that Main Dish
We change recipes according to availability. Food brings us together in celebration and mourning. The structure can be used in poems: Recipes of how to connect with ancestors Recipes for how to love yourself Recipe on how to connect with a recipe or a family member. Let's write!
Janet Rodriguez
Janet Rodriguez is an author, teacher, and editor living in Northern California. She is the author of the family memoir, Making an American Family: A Recipe in Five Generations (Prickly Pear Press, 2022). In the United States, her work has appeared in Hobart, Pangyrus, Eclectica, The Rumpus, Cloud Women’s Quarterly, American River Review, and Calaveras Station. She is the winner of the Bazanella Literary Award for Short Fiction and the Literary Insight for Work in Translation Award, both from CSUS Sacramento in 2017. Her short stories, essays, and poetry usually deal with themes involving morality in faith communities and the mixed-race experience in a culturally binary world. She holds an MFA from Antioch University, Los Angeles. She is currently Assistant Editor of Interviews at The Rumpus. Follow her on Twitter @brazenprincess
Leading Workshop A: "Every Flavor of Memoir: How to Bring Authentic Life to the Page"
(Break-out Session #2--1:30 to 2:30)
Writing memoir involves different kinds of writing muscles than other forms. From memoir in poetry to newer hybrid forms, this seminar will help you diagram your story, find your voice, and forecast an outline for the most important writing project in your life. Whether you are just starting to write your family story, or are knee-deep in the process, come and have fun exploring ways of bringing words to life on the page. Participants will review different forms of memoir, discuss the challenges of writing nonfiction, make a road map for the narrative, and find creative ways to organize significant events and memories. When it’s written well, memoir is more than an account of life, it is life! Come and celebrate the power of the legacy you are leaving behind. Find your voice and tell your story.
Suggested Reading:
The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr
Making an American Family: A Recipe in Five Generations by Janet Rodriguez
Violeta Orozco
Violeta Orozco is a Latino Book Award nominated author for her debut poetry collection The Broken Woman Diaries(Andante Books 2022). A MeChicana bilingual writer, Latina poet, performer and spoken word artist from Mexico City, she is also a Macondo Writers workshop fellow and Winner of Jacar Presses' New Voices Poetry Award 2021, selected by Jaki Shelton Green for her second poetry collection Stillness in the Land of Speed. She is also the author of El Cuarto de la Luna (Literal 2020) and the forthcoming collection Songs Like Talismans (Nomadic Press). She has a monthly column in Nueva York Poetry Review featuring Latina and Chicana poets that she translates into Spanish. She studies her Ph.D. in Creative Writing, translation and Romance Literatures at University of Cincinnati and holds an M.A. from Rutgers University.
Co-leading Workshop C with Susana Praver-Pérez: "Now Serving Poetry--A Meal in Community Part 2"
(Break-out Session #2--1:30 to 2:30)
Why Gorditas are Best Stuffed with Poems
The premise is that kneading gorditas is a parallel process to amasar poemas. How to rebuild a world that we can’t easily access through poetry is similar to how to make a gordita from scratch if you never learned how to cook before. It all burns down to getting your hands dirty with masa and poetry. We seek to uncover the relationship between discomfort and worldbuilding. A poem is as messy as masa, it doesn’t have form yet, you have to knead it, knead the words until they become the right texture and the right shape. The overarching metaphor that defines this workshop is food as poetry and poetry as food: go back to the poem as food, as nourishment, and poetry turning you back to your cultural roots. This workshop also touches on city people’s relationship with food once detached from an agricultural environment.
Susana Praver-Pérez
Susana Praver-Pérez is a Pushcart-nominated poet and a winner of the San Francisco/Nomadic Press Literary Award (2021). Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and her first collection of poetry, Hurricanes, Love Affairs, and Other Disasters was published by Nomadic Press (2021).
Susana has studied poetry at Naropa Institute, UC Berkeley’s “Poetry for the People,” Berkeley City College, and is an alum of Las Dos Brujas Writers’ Workshop (2017).
After working as a Physician Assistant at La Clínica de la Raza in Oakland for 41 years, Susana can now be found at work on her next book in a park overlooking the San Francisco Bay, in her hometown of New York, or while listening to the coquis singing in San Juan.
website: susanapraverperez.com
Co-leading Workshop C with Violeta Orozco: "Now Serving Poetry--A Meal in Community Part 2"
(Break-out Session #2--1:30 to 2:30)
"Presentation is Everything in the Salad of Words"
Come make a poetic salad by arranging words to give a maximum impact using alliteration, repetition, assonance and other poetic structures. Please bring an unstructured poem of yours that you would like to restructure. The goal is to explore how with short lines the mood is choppy, or how long lines have a different feel or flavor, as well as how punctuation really modifies the flavor and presentation of the poem.
