Lorna Dee Cervantes and Barbara Jane Reyes

15 MARCH 2012 — thursday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Lorna Dee Cervantes, Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems, and Barbara Jane Reyes, Diwata, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com; wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested a week in advance by email, editor@poetryflash.org)

More about the readers
Lorna Dee Cervantes new book of poems is Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems. Luis Alberto Urrea says, "In this delightful book, Lorna Dee Cervantes has undertaken a mad discipline: the 100 word format unleashes paradoxically vast effects. Full of playfulness, rage and her traditional fire, Ciento is a masterful performance." Through her writing, she played an important part in the Chicano literary movement, and through Mango, the literary journal she founded, as well as through her small press of the same name. Author of three previous books of poems, she has received numerous honors and awards, including an American Book Prize for her first collection, Emplumada, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a Lila Wallace Readers Digest Fellowship. Barbara Jane Reyes's latest book of poems is Diwata—which means, roughly, 'spirit' in Tagalog—a book which begins in a fusion of Genesis with a Philippine creation myth. Juan Felipe Herrera says of it, "Š[S]he instructs us, lures us, takes us deep into her sacred, jeweled river, then breathes into us our Creation Story—the one we thought we could no longer remember or write or speak or call our own." Born in Manila and then raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Reyes is the author of two previous books, the second of which, Poeta en San Francisco, won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets.