Join us for our monthly poetry event featuring three poets and hosted by poet Mildred Barya. This month, we welcome Angela Narciso Torres, Caridad Moro-Gronlier, and Jehanne Dubrow.
Click here to RSVP. On the day of the event, we will send a reminder email with the link required to attend.
Like most of our events, this event is free. If you decide to attend and to purchase the authors’ books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!
Angela Narciso Torres is the author of What Happens Is Neither (Four Way Books 2021) Blood Orange, winner of the 2013 Willow Books Literature Award for Poetry, and the chapbook, To the Bone (Sundress Publications 2020). Recent work appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, Missouri Review, Quarterly West, Cortland Review, and Poetry Northwest. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Angela has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Illinois Arts Council, and Ragdale Foundation. She won the 2019 Yeats Poetry Prize (W.B. Yeats Society of New York), and New City magazine named her one of Chicago’s Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she currently resides in San Diego. She serves as a senior and reviews editor for RHINO Poetry. Read more: https://www.angelanarcisotorres.com
“What Happens is Neither/ the end nor the beginning. /Yet we’re wired to look for signs,” offers the speaker of Angela Narciso Torres’ latest collection, which approaches motherhood, aging, and mourning through a series of careful meditations. In music, mantra, and prayer, Torres explores the spaces in and around grief—in varying proximity to it and from different vantage points. She writes both structurally formal poems that enfold the emotionality of loss and free verse that loosens the latch on memory and lets us into the sensory worlds of the speaker’s childhood and present. In poems set in two countries and homes, Torres considers what it means to leave a mark, vanish, and stay in one place. In a profound act of recollection and preservation, Torres shows us how to release part of ourselves but remain whole.
Caridad Moro-Gronlier is the author of Tortillera, winner of The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: Florida (Texas Review Press 2021) and the chapbook Visionware (Finishing Line Press 2009). She is a Contributing Editor of Grabbed: Writers Respond to Sexual Assault (Beacon Press 2020) and Associate Editor for SWWIM Every Day. Moro-Gronlier is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant and a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry. Her work has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes, The Best of the Net and two Lambda Literary Awards. Her recent work can be found at The Best American Poetry Blog, West Trestle Review, Literary Mama, The Sextant Review, Limp Wrist Review and others. A career educator, she is an English professor at FIU and MDC in Miami, FL where she resides with her family. Read more: http://www.caridadmoro.com/about-me.html
“An unflinching, delicious, and fierce anthem to Cuban-American and queer identities, Tortillera reclaims the homophobic slur of its title, engaging and subverting the canonical tradition of the love poem. Language, in its topographies and powers and failures, lies at the heart of these poems’ investigations: Moro writes, “of loss / the third language / we speak at home.” Tortillera confronts ‘poverty’s rumble,’ familial connections, sometimes fraught, sometimes endearingly tender. ‘Sifting through the rubble’ of fragmented romantic and parental relationships, the book is brilliant in its critique of beauty standards and machismo. I love Caridad Moro’s work, which reverberates with flavors of Miami—guarapo, harina con huevo frito, yuca, lechón—these are poems I admire and applaud, poems I read and reread with a ferocious appetite.” —Jenny Molberg, author of Refusal
Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine poetry collections, including most recently, Wild Kingdom (LSU Press, 2021), as well as a book of creative nonfiction, throughsmoke: an essay in notes (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her previous poetry collections are Simple Machines, American Samizdat, Dots & Dashes, The Arranged Marriage, Red Army Red, Stateside, From the Fever-World, The Hardship Post, and a chapbook, The Promised Bride. Jehanne’s poems, essays, and book reviews have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Poetry, Southern Review, Pleiades, Colorado Review, and The New England Review. Her work has been featured by American Life in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown, Fresh Air, The Academy of American Poets, as well as on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. She is the founding editor of the national literary journal, Cherry Tree, and a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas. Read more: http://jehannedubrow.com/books/
Wild Kingdom explores the world of academia, examining this strange landscape populated by faculty, administrators, and students. Using what she calls “received academic forms,” Jehanne Dubrow crafts poems that recall the language of academic documents such as syllabi, grading rubrics, and departmental minutes. “Honor Board Hearing,” a series of prose poems, depicts challenges frequently faced by undergraduates, offering fictionalized accounts of cases involving plagiarism, theft, sexual assault, and substance abuse.
