
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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7 FEBRUARY 2025 — friday
8 FEBRUARY 2025 — saturday
- Fiction writer, essayist and journalist Lauren Markham will discuss and read from her new book, Immemorial, the latest volume in Transit Books' Undelivered Lectures series, on the design and function of memorials, with writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit, Call Them By Their True Names, presented in partnership with the Mesa Refuge, Dance Palace, 503 B Street, Point Reyes Station, 3:00 pm PST (For more information, visit: ptreyesbooks.com/event/2025-02-08/lauren-markham-and-rebecca-solnit)
- The El Cerrito Poet Laureate program presents "Place and Placemaking in Poetry and Photography," a conversation about writing and imagining El Cerrito/Richmond in art, with poet, playwright, and novelist Ishmael Reed, who has written extensively about place and Richmond, El Cerrito, and Oakland, with Lewis Watts, professor, and photographer who photographs the Bay Area and Black diaspora, and El Cerrito Poet Laureate Tess Taylor, El Cerrito Community Center, Garden Room, 7007 Moeser Lane, El Cerrito, 4:30 pm PST (For more information, visit: www.el-cerrito.org/1561/Current-Poet-Laureate)
9 FEBRUARY 2025 — sunday
10 FEBRUARY 2025 — monday
11 FEBRUARY 2025 — tuesday
12 FEBRUARY 2025 — wednesday
13 FEBRUARY 2025 — thursday
14 FEBRUARY 2025 — friday
15 FEBRUARY 2025 — saturday
16 FEBRUARY 2025 — sunday
- Writer, playwright, organizer, and educator Dr. Mahogany L. Browne, former San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin, recording/performing artist Destiny Muhammad, and Santa Clara County Poet Laureate Emeritus Tshaka Campbell read and perform for a special Black History Month event celebrating the power of poetry and music, SJZ Break Room, 310 South 1st Street, San Jose, 6:00 pm PST (For more information, visit: www.eventbrite.com/e/tiny-room-poetry-series-tickets-1131267263839?aff=oddtdtcreator&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR3KxvMAG7M-3jW_crIJM_FFFNqnjaqJLOdtQdAjFIT_9_hYcW6MYQJSHU8_aem_C2VWI8RhXYOAhYnr_Nyevw)
17 FEBRUARY 2025 — monday
18 FEBRUARY 2025 — tuesday
19 FEBRUARY 2025 — wednesday
20 FEBRUARY 2025 — thursday
21 FEBRUARY 2025 — friday
22 FEBRUARY 2025 — saturday
23 FEBRUARY 2025 — sunday
24 FEBRUARY 2025 — monday
25 FEBRUARY 2025 — tuesday
26 FEBRUARY 2025 — wednesday
- Author of two National Book Award-winning novels, Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward will discuss her latest novel, Let Us Descend, as part of Writer's Symposium by the Sea 30th Anniversary Event, "Writing That Redeems," with founder and host of the annual Writer's Symposium by the Sea and journalist Dean Nelson, Brown Chapel, Point Loma Nazarene University, 3900 Lomaland Drive, San Diego, $16, 7:00 pm PST (For more information, visit: www.warwicks.com/event/ward-2025)
27 FEBRUARY 2025 — thursday
- Poet and author of The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros will discuss her first poetry collection in twenty-eight years, Woman Without Shame, as part of Writer's Symposium by the Sea 30th Anniversary Event, "Writing That Redeems," with founder and host of the annual Writer's Symposium by the Sea and journalist Dean Nelson, Brown Chapel, Point Loma Nazarene University, 3900 Lomaland Drive, San Diego, $16, 7:00 pm PST (For more information, visit: www.warwicks.com/event/cisneros-2025)
28 FEBRUARY 2025 — friday
- Author of the best-selling memoir, Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom will discuss his latest novel, The Little Liar, as part of Writer's Symposium by the Sea 30th Anniversary Event, "Writing That Redeems," with founder and host of the annual Writer's Symposium by the Sea and journalist Dean Nelson, Brown Chapel, Point Loma Nazarene University, 3900 Lomaland Drive, San Diego, $16, 7:00 pm PST (For more information, visit: www.warwicks.com/event/albom-2025)
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