2021 Washington State Book Awards Presents: Take a Stand, Art Against Hate, A Raven Chronicles Anthology
December 9, 6pm, free online event, Registration required.
(“Rescatando lo que es útil para el presente: Activismo por la Nación Ópata”)
Discussion in Spanish & English
Participants: Kathleen Alcalá, moderator (Bainbridge Island, Washington State);
Isabel Cristina Murrieta López (Nácori Chico, Sonora, Mexico);
Dani Ahuicapahtzin Cornejo Warner (East Oakland, California)
Set in northern Mexico in the 1870s, Spirits of the Ordinary is a novel that weaves the stories of women struggling against societal constraints, Mexican Jews practicing their religion in secret, and a gold prospector turned spiritual seeker in a spectacular desert landscape.
Originally published by Chronicle Books in 1997, Spirits incorporates styles and themes that the author has continued to explore in her later novels and nonfiction works: fabulist/speculative fiction, environmental writing, the Mexico-U.S. borderland in the late 19th century, and crypto-Judaism.
Register at: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMkdu6gpzgiGNOtiUn_paHBgk700QPwx8AC
Please join Kathleen Alcalá and Rigoberto González to launch a new edition of SPIRITS of the ORDINARY from Raven Chronicles Press—with a foreword by Rigoberto González.
Link to live even:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88420546769
Also live on Raven’s YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RavenChroniclesPress/
Set in northern Mexico in the 1870s, Spirits of the Ordinary weaves the stories of women struggling against societal constraints, Mexican Jews practicing their religion in secret, and a gold prospector turned spiritual seeker in a spectacular desert landscape.
Winner of the Washington State Governor’s Writers Award and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award when originally published in 1997, Spirits of the Ordinary was one of the first books to address the topic of the hidden Jews of Mexico. The author has gone on to write two more novels of the Mexico-U.S. borderland in the late 19th century (The Flower in the Skull and Treasures in Heaven), and in her collection of essays, The Desert Remembers My Name: On Family and Writing, she describes how the three novels were inspired by family stories, interviews with elders, and extensive research.
Rigoberto González is the author of eighteen books of poetry and prose. His awards include Lannan, Guggenheim, NEA, NYFA, and USA Rolón fellowships, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. A critic-at-large for The LA Times and contributing editor for Poets & Writers Magazine, he is the series editor for the Camino del Sol Latinx Literary Series at the University of Arizona Press. Currently, he’s Distinguished Professor of English and the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey.
A writer whose work embraces both traditional and innovative storytelling techniques, KATHLEEN ALCALÁ is the author of six award-winning books that include a collection of stories, three novels, an essay collection, and a blueprint for sustainability, The Deepest Roots: Finding Food and Community on a Pacific Northwest Island. The daughter of Mexican parents, Alcalá was born and raised in California, and now lives in the Pacific Northwest.
https://www.eagleharborbooks.com/event/zoom-conversation-kathleen-alcala-claudia-castro-luna
Set in northern Mexico in the 1870s, Spirits of the Ordinary tells interweaving stories centered on Zacarías Carabajal, who leaves his comfortable city home to prospect for gold in the wilderness while his abandoned wife, Estela, struggles to build a new life. Visions, dreams, and portents are part of the everyday world of Spirits of the Ordinary. Estela's siblings, the enigmatic and supernaturally beautiful twins Manzana and Membrillo, discover their gift for water divining. Zacarías's mother, Mariana, has been silent all her adult life after experiencing an apocalyptic vision of angels in her teens. His father, Julio, is an apothecary devoted to Torah study and Jewish mysticism, practicing his religion in secret as generations before him have done. Meanwhile, Zacarías's wanderings turn into a spiritual quest that takes him to the ancient cliff dwellings known as Casas Grandes.Presenting a tapestry of fascinating lives as well as the story of a reluctant mystic in a spectacular desert landscape, Spirits of the Ordinary demonstrates that, as Alcalá writes in her introduction, "magic and holiness are all around us."
A writer whose work embraces both traditional and innovative storytelling techniques, Kathleen Alcalá is the author of six award-winning books that include a collection of short stories, three novels, an essay collection, and a blueprint for sustainability, The Deepest Roots: Finding Food and Community on a Pacific Northwest Island. The daughter of Mexican parents, Alcalá was born and raised in California, and now lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Claudia Castro Luna is an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate fellow (2019), WA State Poet Laureate (2018 – 2021) and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet (2015-2018), the author of One River, A Thousand Voices (Chin Music Press), the Pushcart nominated Killing Marías (Two Sylvias Press) also shortlisted for WA State 2018 Book Award in poetry, and the chapbook This City (Floating Bridge Press). Her most recent non-fiction is forthcoming in There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis (Vintage) due out in May 2021. Born in El Salvador she came to the United States in 1981. Living in English and Spanish, Claudia writes and teaches in Seattle on unceded Duwamish lands where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.
Information on joining the free Zoom will be posted next week. We look forward to seeing as many of you there as possible!
*Anyone interested in ordering Claudia Castro Luna's book can find them here. Eagle Harbor Book Co. will be unable to order them for this event. Thank you for understanding.
Register at:
"A fecund fable about the convergence of cultures—Mexican, American and Jewish—along the Mexico/Texas border.... Alcalá's seductive writing mixes fatalism and hope, logic and fantasy."—Publishers Weekly.
"Alcalá's lyrical language soars, sweeping the reader into achingly beautiful landscapes, the rapture of spiritual experience and the madness lurking at the edge of solitude."—Claudia Castro Luna.
Kathleen Alcalá is the author of five other works of fiction and non-fiction. Joining her this evening will be Dalia Kandiyoti, professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and author of The Converso’s Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Cinema (Stanford University), a book which traces some of the same ground Kathleen Alcalá works in her fiction.
"Embedded in a sophisticated theoretical framework and a wide range of historical reference, The Converso's Return brilliantly explores and confronts questions of memory's use and representation. In creating a new literary map based on seemingly disparate texts that actually belong together, Dalia Kandiyoti is ever vigilant to the political implications of all forms of return."—Ammiel Alcalay.
REGISTER @:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIodO6prjkqEtWWzqOmRYTDj0ex2Gfl4uRL
Anna Bálint is a London-born, Seattle-based poet, writer, editor and teacher of East European descent. Her most recent editorial work is the anthology Take a Stand, Art Against Hate (Raven Chronicles Press, 2020). Her story collection Horse Thief (Curbstone Press, 2004), was a finalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in numerous journals and magazines. Two earlier books of poetry were Out of the Box and spread them crimson sleeves like wings. An alumna of Hedgebrook’s Writers in Residence Program and the Jack Straw Writers Program, Anna has also taught creative writing for many years and in many places, including Washington State Prisons, El Centro de la Raza, Writers in the Schools, Antioch University, Richard Hugo House, and Path with Art (all in Seattle). In 2001, she received a Leading Voice Award in recognition of her creative work with urban and immigrant youth at El Centro de la Raza. Currently she is a teaching artist at Recovery Café where, in 2012, she founded Safe Place Writing Circle for people in recovery from trauma, addiction, mental illness, and homelessness.
https://sites.google.com/site/soulfoodpoetrynight/future-readings/march-18-2021
https://sites.google.com/site/soulfoodpoetrynight/Home
Join Raven Contributors to "Take a Stand, Art Against Hate": March 18, 7pm; followed by an open mic.
MC: Michael Dylan Welch; Readers: Marc Beaudin (Livingston, Montana), Risa Denenberg (Olympic peninsula), Thomas Hubbard (Kirkland), Tamam Kahn (San Rafael, CA), and Susana Praver-Pérez (Oakland, CA).
Marc Beaudin, an Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness Foundation artist-in-residence, is a poet, theatre artist and ABAA-member bookseller in Livingston, Montana. He is the author of Life List: Poems, the hitchhiking memoir, Vagabond Song: Neo-Haibun from the Peregrine Journals, and several other books. His work has appeared in numerous journals including Cutthroat, High Desert Journal and Whitefish Review, and has been widely anthologized in publications fighting for environmental and social justice. He believes the Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D is more powerful than all the guns, smokestacks and coal trains in the world. More at https://crowvoice.com.
Risa Denenberg lives on the Olympic peninsula and is co-founder and editor at Headmistress Press, publisher of lesbian/bi/trans poetry. She publishes poetry book reviews at Adroit, the Rumpus and other venues, and curates The Poetry Café, an online meeting place where poetry chapbooks are reviewed. She has published seven collections of poetry, most recently, slight faith (MoonPath Press, 2018) and Posthuman, finalist for the 2020 Floating Bridge Chapbook Contest. Visit: https://thepoetrycafe.online/ and https://risadenenberg.com/.
Thomas Hubbard, a retired writing instructor and spoken word performer, wrote features for various newspapers and magazines during the 1980s, then authored Nail and other hardworking poems, Year of the Dragon Press, 1994; Junkyard Dogz (also available on audio CD); and Injunz, a chapbook, also Poems for my people, Foothills Publishing 2011. He designed and published Children Remember Their Fathers (an anthology), and books by seven other authors. His book reviews have appeared in Square Lake, Raven Chronicles, New Pages and The Cartier Street Review. Publication credits include poems in Yellow Medicine Review, spring 2010, I Was Indian, editor Susan Deer Cloud (Foothills Publishing, 2010), and Florida Review; and short stories in Red Ink andYellow Medicine Review.
Tamam Kahn is the author two books on the women of early Islam: Untold, A History of the Wives of Prophet Muhammad (Monkfish Books, 2010), was awarded an International Book Award in 2011, and translated into Indonesian; and Fatima’s Touch, Poems and Stories of the Prophet’s Daughter (Ruhaniat Press, 2016). Tamam has traveled to sacred sites in Morocco, Syria, Jordan, Andalusia, and India, and spent two decades researching early Islamic history. In 2009, she was invited by the Royal Ministry of Morocco to read her poetry at a world-wide Sufi conference in Marrakesh. She presented at The Mystics Summit, February, 2021: Mother Ancestor Stories. Website: https://completeword.wordpress.com.
Susana Praver-Pérez is an Oakland-based, Pushcart nominated poet. By day, she works as a Physician Assistant at La Clínica de la Raza. By night, she can be found reading poetry at open mics from San Francisco to San Juan, By nature, she is a storyteller recounting that to which she bears witness through her poetic lens. Susana’s work has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals including: The Acentos Review, La Respuesta, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Poets Reading the News, About Place Journal, Meow Meow Pow Pow Press, Dove Tails, and the Raven Chronicles anthology Take a Stand: Art Against Hate. Her first full-length book of poetry titled: Hurricanes, Love Affairs and Other Disasters, will be released by Nomadic Press in 2021.
On Jan. 21, 2021, Thursday, from 7:8:30 pm PST, contributors from the anthology Take A Stand, Art Against Hate will read their work and work by other authors. With over 170 contributors, including Jericho Brown, Lucille Clifton, Marge Piercy, and Danez Smith, Take a Stand features poetry, artwork, essays, and fiction that confront past and ongoing injustices and offer visions of positive change. Co-hosted by Seattle City of Literature, The Seattle Public Library, and Raven Chronicles Press. Third Place Books bookstore will partner with us.
Meeting ID: 840 8704 7740
Holly Hughes (moderator) is the author of Hold Fast, Sailing by Ravens, coauthor of The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World, and editor of the award-winning anthology, Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease. Her fine art chapbook Passings received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 2017.
Kathleen Alcalá: Both a graduate of and instructor in the Clarion West Science Fiction and Fantasy program, her work embraces both traditional and innovative storytelling techniques. She is the author of six award-winning books that include a collection of stories, three novels, a book of essays, and, most recently, The Deepest Roots: Finding Food and Community on a Pacific Northwest Island, from the University of Washington Press.
Ronda Piszk Broatch, poet and photographer, is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations (MoonPath Press, 2015). Ronda was a finalist for the Four Way Books Prize, and her poems have been nominated several times for the Pushcart prize.
Mike Dillon, retired publisher of Pacific Publishing Co., grew up on Bainbridge Island. His most recent book is Departures: Poetry and Prose on the Removal of Bainbridge Island’s Japanese Americans After Pearl Harbor(Unsolicited Press, April 2019).
Ed Harkness is the author of three poetry collections, Saying the Necessary, Beautiful Passing Lives, and, most recently, The Law of the Unforeseen, from Pleasure Boat Studio Press. He lives in Shoreline, Waashington.
Anna Odessa Linzer lives on Dabob Bay, where she writes poetry and fiction, is adapting her play from her novel A River Story into a film, and where she swims year around. Her novel Ghost Dancing received an American Book Award in 1998; three of her other novels were published as a limited-edition trilogy Home Waters by Marquand Books.
Jed Myers is author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press), and four chapbooks. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Poetry Northwest, The American Journal of Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, and elsewhere.
Carletta Carrington Wilson is a visual and literary artist. The form and formation of language is integral to the work she creates by which she explores the “texts” of textiles. Her installation, letter to a laundress, was exhibited at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, the University of Puget Sound’s Kittredge Gallery, and Seattle’s King Street Station.
