Saturday, April 18th
Online Workshops 10:00 am – 4:00 pm (details to come)
Online Featured Poets Reading 7:00 pm (details to come)
Sunday, April 19th
Online Poetry Open Mic 6:00 pm (details to come)
We appreciate Solar Culture Gallery and Cafe Passé Restaurant & Bar who had agreed to host events prior to the Festival’s shift online. Thank you! We hope to work with you again soon.
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2020 Poets
Sean Avery
Sean Avery (pronouns he/they) is a rapper, poet and teaching artist from Avondale, Arizona. Their work integrates Hip-Hop music, poetry, and theater to explore how Black masculinity is projected onto their body. They strive for an authentic performance of self, hoping to inspire others to examine their own identities. Avery’s work has been featured on Afropunk, Blavity, the 2015-2016 Wisconsin Film Festival, and the 2018-2019 Chicago Hip-Hop Theater Festival. They’ve shared the stage with performers such as Saul Williams, Lemon Anderson, and J. Ivy. They’re also an alum of the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a B.A. in English Creative Writing, where they received the nation’s only full-tuition Hip-Hop & Spoken Word scholarship, First Wave. Currently, Avery teaches throughout the Phoenix valley at schools and nonprofits while performing their Hip-Hop play and album “skinnyblk” both regionally and nationwide. “skinnyblk” the album is available now on all streaming platforms.
Sylvia Chan
Sylvia Chan hails from the San Francisco Bay Area, where she performed as a jazz pianist. She lives in Tucson, where she teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Arizona and serves as court advocate for foster kids in Pima County and nonfiction editor at Entropy. Her debut poetry collection is We Remain Traditional (Center for Literary Publishing 2018), and her essays appear in Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019.
Diana Marie Delgado
Diana Marie Delgado is the author of Tracing the Horse, a New York Times “New & Noteworthy,” selection. She is the recipient of numerous grants, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A graduate of UC Riverside and Columbia University, she currently resides in Tucson, where she is the Literary Director of the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona. Photo Credit: Felicia Zamora
Bojan Louis (Diné)
Bojan Louis (Diné) is the author of the poetry collection Currents (BkMk Press 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award, and the nonfiction chapbook Troubleshooting Silence in Arizona (The Guillotine Series 2012). He is an assistant professor in the Creative Writing and American Indian Studies programs at the University of Arizona.
Pam Uschuk
Political activist and wilderness advocate, Pam Uschuk has howled out six books of poems, including CRAZY LOVE, winner of a 2010 American Book Award, FINDING PEACHES IN THE DESERT (Tucson/Pima Literaature Award), and her most recent, BLOOD FLOWER, one of Book List’s Notable Books in 2015. Her collection, Refugee, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Translated into more than a dozen languages, her work appears in over three hundred journals and anthologies worldwide, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Agni Review, Parnassus Review, etc. Among her awards are the War Poetry Prize from winningwrites.com, New Millenium Poetry Prize, Best of the Web, the Struga International Poetry Prize (for a theme poem), the Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women, the King’s English Poetry Prize and prizes from Ascent, Iris, and AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Editor-In-Chief of CUTTHROAT, A JOURNAL OF THE ARTS, Uschuk lives in Tucson, Arizona. She edited the anthology, Truth To Power: Writers Respond To The Rhetoric Of Hate And Fear, 2017. Uschuk has also just edited Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century, March 2020. Often a featured writer, Uschuk teaches at the U of A Poetry Center and at Ghost Ranch. She was the John C. Hodges Visiting Writer at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Recently she was awarded a writing resididency retreat at Storyknife Women Writers Colony in Homer Alaska for the month of September 2020. In April 2020, her work will be feature in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day series. Her multi-genre book called OF THUNDERLIGHT AND MOON: AN ODYSSEY THROUGH OVARIAN CANCER is in the hands of an agent.