Dear Friends of Poetry,
The Poetry Night Reading Series is excited to feature Inés Hernández-Ávila (Nez Perce/Tejana) and Wendah Alvarez at 7 PM on Thursday, June 2nd, 2022 on the first floor of the John Natsoulas Gallery, 521 1st Street in Davis.
Inés Hernández-Ávila (Niimiipuu/Nez Perce and Tejana) is a professor of Native American Studies at UC Davis, as well as a poet, visual artist, and translator. One of the six founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), Hernández-Ávila focuses her research on Native American/Indigenous poetry, and Native American/Indigenous religious traditions. She is a member of Luk’upsíimey/The North Star Collective, a group of Niimiipuu creative writers and language workers.
Hernández-Ávila has been awarded two grants to take a Luk’upsíimey delegation to San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, to meet with Mayan poets, scholars, and artists, in August 2022. She has a contract with SUNY Press for the multilingual collection Donde Nacen los Cantos/Where the Songs Are Born: Contemporary Mayan and Zoque Poetry, featuring twenty poets in translation. She collaborated with the Library of Congress to produce the site La Palabra Indigenous Voices viewable at https://guides.loc.gov/palabra-archive/indigenous-voices. Her own poetry emerged during the years of social movement in the 1970s.
Wendah Alvarez is a Tinguian Lokana Filipina PhD student in Native American Studies with a designated emphasis in writing, rhetoric, and composition. Her research privileges an indigenous narrative paradigm which includes poetry and poetics, women’s rights, and activism. Alvarez seeks to shift mainstream understanding of indigenous literary practices while theorizing the methodologies created by, with, and for Native American Indigenous writers. Through engagement with NAS, she is looking at the ways in which settler colonialism continues to impact the Filipinx Diaspora, with the intention of engaging issues of colonial mentality that continues to allow the subjectivity of Filipino/as by Euro-Western nations.
This event will take place on the roof of the John Natsoulas Gallery (521 1st Street) at 7 PM on Thursday, June 2nd. There will be an open mic after the featured performers. Open mic performances will be limited to four minutes or two items, whichever is shorter. Please mask your vaccinated selves before entering the Gallery. No matter what the CDC or Yolo County has decreed, we ask that you wear your mask while inside the Natsoulas Gallery.
“Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Find out more about the Poetry Night Reading Series by visiting https://www.poetryindavis.com. Invite your friends to sign up for the mailing list. To find out more about Dr. Andy, check out his weekly newsletter at https://andyjones.substack.com.
Dr. Andy
Upcoming Poetry Night Events:
June 16th: Judy Halebsky and Dean Rader
July 7th: Susan Kelly Dewitt
July 21st: Matt Mitchell
Future Poetry Night Readers will include Mischa Kuczynski, Tim Kahl, K.M. English, Angela James, and Charles Halsted.
