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Jose Antonio Villarán

Jose Antonio Villarán and Sesshu Foster

20 NOVEMBER 2022 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Jose Antonio Villarán, Open Pit, and Sesshu Foster, City of the Future, online via Zoom, free, 3:00 pm PST (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)

Please join us for a virtual reading on Sunday, November 20 at 3:00 pm PST. We are excited to bring you this event via Zoom. To register for this reading, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series.

Featured books for this event are available at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Jose Antonio Villarán's new collection is Open Pit. He is author of two previous collections, including la distancia es siempre la misma and el cerrajero. He is also author of one book of translation, Album of Fences, by Omar Pimienta. Sandra and Ben Doller say, "Jose Antonio Villarán's Open Pit affectively pits global addictions against personal extractions, calculating the enormous human and environmental weight of techno-privilege. Hurtling down the superhighway of forms—the ocean on one side, the desert on the other—the poems in this book accumulate into a desperate investigation of complicity, commodity, and heredity, as they swerve from Sacramento to San Diego to Lima to China to dust. The open pit of the title—of the exploited town of Morococha, of the raided earth itself—echoes and plumbs as it is stripped bare, as it is offered to the poet's young son Miqel, the future. This text is a necessary addition to the canon of disembordered political poetry which, here, honestly acknowledging its own limits, dilates the aperture." He holds an MFA in Writing from UC San Diego and is a PhD candidate in Literature at UC Santa Cruz.

Sesshu Foster is a poet, novelist, and veteran public school teacher. Foster's most recent poetry collection, City of the Future, is "the poetic soundtrack of a people and a place, of their history and their dreams." He is co-author, with artist Arturo Romo, of the surrealist, multigenre novel ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines. Ben Ehrenreich says "ELADATL is strong medicine against the erasures of history, a mega-vitamin for struggles yet to come." Foster has taught writing in East Los Angeles, at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems. Foster earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He lives in Alhambra, California.




Daily Listings

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13 JUNE 2025 — friday

14 JUNE 2025 — saturday

15 JUNE 2025 — sunday

16 JUNE 2025 — monday

17 JUNE 2025 — tuesday

  • Oakland Poetry Slam, monthly on the third Tuesday, Tamarack, 1501 Harrison Street, Oakland, 6:30-10:30 pm PDT (For more information, visit: tamarackoakland.com)

18 JUNE 2025 — wednesday

19 JUNE 2025 — thursday

  • Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Richard Tillinghast, Night Train to Memphis, Jeanne Foster, Your Form Became My Own, and Alan Williamson, The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 7:00 pm PDT (poetryflash.org).

20 JUNE 2025 — friday

21 JUNE 2025 — saturday

22 JUNE 2025 — sunday

23 JUNE 2025 — monday

24 JUNE 2025 — tuesday

25 JUNE 2025 — wednesday

26 JUNE 2025 — thursday

27 JUNE 2025 — friday

28 JUNE 2025 — saturday

29 JUNE 2025 — sunday

  • Café Frida Poetry Festival presents Jack Crimmins, Lisa Shulman, Dave Holt, Melissa Eleftherion, readings from Phyllis Meshulam's new book by her daughter Audrey, John Duran, Briahn Kelly-Brennan, and Timothy Williams, hosted by Gwynn O'Gara, Café Frida, 300 South A Street, Santa Rosa, free, 1:00-3:00 (www.cafefridagallery.com)

30 JUNE 2025 — monday


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