Palabra Pura, Chicago's home for cutting edge, innovative Latino poetry is evolving in exciting ways, with its 2008 calendar of stellar talent solidly in place. While still basing itself at the California Clipper, Palabra Pura will begin to also hold events at Latino venues throughout the city. This month, join nationally know poet and performer, Tim Z. Hernandez and Chicago actor, poet and activist, Stephanie Gentry-Fernandez. Wednesday,
February 20th. 8 pm Decima Musa Restaurant
1901 S. Loomis St. Chicago, IL
About the poets: Tim Z. Hernandez is a writer and performer originally from central California. His writing and performance texts have appeared in numerous anthologies and publications, and his performances featured at prestigious venues across the nation, including: LA’s Getty Center Museum, The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, Stanford University, and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. In the past, he has been commissioned by major groups such as the United Way of Greater Los Angeles to write and perform his original plays on issues of homelessness and poverty. Currently, he’s working in tandem with Poets & Writers Inc, and California Center for the Book, offering bilingual poetry workshops across the United States.
He is the recipient of several notable awards including: 2006 American Book Award for his debut collection of poetry Skin Tax, San Francisco Foundation’s James Duval Phelan Award, a Best Solo Production Award for his one man show, Diaries of a Macho, and the Zora Neal Hurston Award for writers of color dedicated to their communities. In the interest of artistic development, Hernandez’s focus is on excavating stories that bring to light the limitless potential of the human capacity, stories of physical and metaphysical journeys, with special attention to marginalized populations. When he’s not busy teaching creative writing and performance, he’s touring the country, collaborating with his word-music-theater collective, Brown Lotus, and offering workshops to Universities, arts groups, cultural centers, foundations, and libraries. Tim holds a B.A. in Writing & Literature from Naropa University, the first accredited Buddhist School in the west.
Currently, he resides in Boulder, Colorado with his wife and two daughters.
What People Are Saying About Tim Z. Hernandez
"Tim Hernandez is one of the finest and most exciting new talents to emerge from the new generation of Latino writers!”- Bloomsbury Review, Ray Gonzalez
“It’s too reductionistic to call Tim Hernandez a performance poet…though his voice and rhythms surely benefit from the energy behind a microphone, the complexity of his ideas merit the slower pace study made possible through the written pages of Skin Tax.” - El Paso Times Book Review Rigoberto Gonzalez
“Tim Hernandez is a dynamic force as a writer and performer!” - Gary Soto Author of, Nickel & Dime
“Hernandez is a poet of obvious and quickly realized skills…his images are brilliant, sharp, and concise, his language spare yet rich. Poetry of the here and now, Brown Lotus is the kind of task that should have been undertaken long ago!” - Amiri Baraka, Author of, Transbluesency
“I like Tim’s boldness, his willingness to be raw and trust the content of the poem to make it real and legitimate, his words sizzle and spark with excitement, targeting with a relentless passion his desire to express what he is trying to convey.” - Jimmy Santiago Baca, Author of, A Place To Stand
“[Tim Hernandez] …represents a whole new direction in the Latino literary world!” - Juan Felipe Herrera, Author of, Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler, and 187 Reasons Mexicans Can't Cross the Border
“[Skin Tax] is poetry not for delicate sensibilities, unafraid, it dares to stand out and speak of subjects commonly eschewed by other poets.” - Midwest Book Review
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Stephanie Gentry-Fernandez is a poet and performer from the South Side whose male side you may recognize from Teatro Luna's recent production of "Machos." She has a deep personal commitment to anti-oppression work and currently works at the Broadway Youth Center.
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Letras Latinas, The Wind Shifts and a National Tour!
The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry ON TOUR
“In the hour of extremes, long live these brave wordsmiths of American letters.”
— Sandra Cisneros
February 23, 2008, Palm Beach, FL
@The Society of the Four Arts
Eduardo C. Corral
Kevin A. González
Sheryl Luna
May 31, 2008, Minneapolis, MN
@The Loft Literary Center
Urayoán Noel
Carl Marcum
Adela Najarro
Emmy Pérez
September 25, 2008, Seattle, WA
@Richard Hugo House
Richard Blanco
María Meléndez
Steven Cordova
Deborah Parédez
“The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry ON TOUR” is supported in part by the Ford Foundation, JP Morgan Chase, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Southwest Airlines through a grant from the NALAC Fund for the Arts.
Letras Latinas is the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. The Guild Complex is a community-based literary organization in Chicago.
The Wind Shifts gathers, for the first time, works by emerging Latino and Latina poets in the twenty-first century. Here readers will discover 25 new and vital voices including Naomi Ayala, RichardThe writers included in this volume have published poetry in well-regarded literary magazines. Some have published chapbooks or first collections, but none had published more than one book at the time of selection. This results in a freshness that energizes the enterprise. Certainly there is poetry here that is political, but this is not a polemical book; it is a poetry book. While conscious of their roots, the artists are equally conscious of living in the contemporary world—fully engaged with the possibilities of subject and language. The variety is tantalizing.
There are sonnets and a sestina; poems about traveling and living overseas; poems rooted in the natural world and poems embedded in suburbia; poems nourished by life on the U.S.–Mexico border and poems electrified by living in Chicago or Los Angeles or San Francisco or New York City. Some of the poetry is traditional; some is avant-garde; some is informed by traditional poetry in Spanish; some follows English forms that are hundreds of years old. There are love poems, spells that defy logic, flashes of hope, and moments of loss. In short, this is the rich and varied poetry of young, talented North American Latinos and Latinas.
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ABOUT THE ANTHOLOGY
ABOUT THE ANTHOLOGY
“In the hour of extremes, long live these brave wordsmiths of American letters. Hallowed be the poets when the news is diffused in the name of susto. Viva the citizens of truth. Hallelujah the devotees of language, the languished souls enamored of the syllable.” —Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street
“The poets in this anthology seem as though they just want to write poems, not specifically Latino poems. They are much too cross-pollinated for that—we all are, if truth be told—which is what makes that synthesis possible, the marvelous marbling at the core." —Aleida Rodríguez, author of Garden of Exile
“Here it is again, the shock of the new, eager as always to unsettle the present, to reconfigure the past while redefining the future. Ah, the impetus of the young!” —Ilan Stavans
“At last, a 21st century anthology that confirms the breadth and depth and diversity of contemporary Latino/a writing. The poems in this collection defy any stereotypes about ‘Latino poetry’ and testify to the rich variousness of the American Latino/a experience. Readers—rejoice!" —Valerie Martínez, author of Absence, Luminescent and World to World
“With jagged beauty, this collection expands our consciousness: documents and honors lives often absent from American poetry. In these pages, we join souls in struggle, almas luchando." —Pat Mora
"The title of the ravishing collection of poems by 25 Latino and Latina writers can be read as an allusion to change and to the fact that poetry is a force, like wind, that knows know borders. Whether inspired by family, love, despair, poems by Rilke, or a painting by Jose Clemente Orozco, the poets gathered here are involved in the infinite possibilities of language."
— Booklist
"This is a compelling and exhilarating addition to Latino letters."— El Paso Times
Lisa Alvarado
Tim Hernandez rocks!
ReplyDeleteThis is a most interesting blog.
ReplyDeleteStay on groovin' safari,
Tor