ASU Department of English

Poetry Workshop For Incarcerated Writers

Poetry Workshop For Incarcerated Writers

Superstition Review

Future Present: A Workshop Series is an 8-week program designed to explore the political possibilities of poetry and imagine new ways of telling the stories we carry. By the end of the workshop series, each poet will revise an original piece to be included in an anthology, submitted to Iron City Magazine, and performed at the final celebratory reading.

This is open to formerly incarcerated people and family/friends of current/formerly incarcerated people. There are 30 workshop seats available on a first come, first serve basis.

The workshops are Saturdays April 9-May 7 from 11 am to 12:30 pm MST, 2-3:30pm EST on Zoom. Please register here by April 2 to receive the link for all workshops.

Directed by Assistant Professor Solmaz Sharif, Poetry for the People at ASU is a program modeled after the one founded by late poet, scholar, and activist June Jordan at UC Berkeley. Focused on poetry as a medium for telling the truth and building beloved community, the program offers an introductory poetry course for students at ASU, the opportunity for students to meet and work with established poets, and workshops and readings for the greater Phoenix metro area. For more info, visit here.

Meet the workshop facilitators!

Jade Cho is the author of In the Tongue of Ghosts (First Word Press, 2016). Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and has appeared in Apogee, BOAAT, The Offing and elsewhere. As an MFA candidate at Arizona State University, she has received the Virginia G. Piper Creative Engagement Fellowship, the Virginia G. Piper Creative Research Fellowship, and two Swarthout Awards. Jade holds a BA in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley, where she studied and taught in June Jordan’s Poetry for the People and learned how to write, perform, and organize in Bay Area spoken word communities. She has been on two nationally-competing slam teams, representing the Bay Area at Brave New Voices 2010 and UC Berkeley at College Unions Poetry Slam 2013, where she and her teammates won “Best Political Poem” and “Best Writing as a Team.” She is a co-founder of Ghostlines, a collective of artists and educators, and The Root Slam, a free poetry venue in her hometown of Oakland, California. The granddaughter of Hoisanese immigrants who settled on Ohlone and Tongva land, she is currently at work on a project tracing memory, grief, and desire through the archive of Chinese Exclusion and the Chinese Confession Program. 

Julián Delacruz is a third year M.F.A Candidate at Arizona State University. He is a June Jordan Teaching Fellow under ASU’s new poetry program, Poetry for the People, a workshop focused on poetry as a medium for telling the truth and building beloved community. While deeply attentive to craft, he loves mentoring writers who want to embrace more reckless and frayed modes of questioning. Having taught creative writing for multiple years, and also having worked a series of editing internships at Roof Books (’11), The Paris Review (’12), PEN American Center (’14), The Iowa Review (’15-’17) and Catapult (’16), he is poised to give insightful editorial feedback to writers of many different persuasions. Julián is also the co-host of Equality Arizona’s Queer Poetry Salon, the largest queer reading series in the southwest. He has had the pleasure to feature such esteemed poets as CA Conrad, Ariana Reines, Richard Siken, Eduardo Corral, and Tommy Pico, alongside queer indie poets across many identities. Delacruz was awarded the 2020 Mabelle A. Lyon award in poetry, and a Glendon & Kathryn Swarthout Award in writing at Arizona State. He lives and writes in Tempe, AZ.

Avery Meinen was born and raised between the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers and Lake Erie. They are a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and former editor of Sampsonia Way Magazine, a publication of City of Asylum Pittsburgh. They have worked as a teaching artist with high school youth, and coached a team of spoken word poets in the Philly Slam League. They were a fellow with Crescendo Literary’s Emerging Poets Incubator in 2017 and a Winter 2021 Tin House Scholar. In their time as an MFA candidate at Arizona State, they have received a Virginia G. Piper Creative Research Fellowship and a Swarthout Award. In addition to their fellowship with Poetry for the People, they are currently a graduate research fellow with the Recovering Truth Project, a project of the Center for the Study of Conflict and Religion at ASU. Their current project examines the intersections of extractive industry and physical and sexual violence, particularly in the bodies and worlds of children. Their work is oriented towards radical queer and trans ecologies, holds survival to be a profoundly creative act, and aims to reconsider ruin, both embodied and ecological, as a site of possibility.

Stellar Alumni Reading Series

Stellar Alumni Reading Series

Superstition Review
Jacqueline Balderrama | Venita Blackburn

Join the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English at ASU in welcoming poet Jacqueline Balderrama and fiction writer Venita Blackburn at the Stellar Alumni Reading Series event on Thursday, March 3, 2022, at 7 p.m. This event is free of charge, in-person, and open to the public.

It will be held at Tempe Campus in the Pima Auditorium Room 230. The location is Memorial Union (MU) 301 E. Orange St.

This is a great opportunity to hear the works of some of ASU’s star graduates. Learn more about them below to see just how awesome they are!

Jacqueline Balderrama is the author of “Now in Color” (Perugia Press, 2020) and the chapbook “Nectar and Small” (Finishing Line Press, 2019). She serves as a poetry editor for Iron City Magazine, has been involved in the Letras Latinas literary initiative, and the ASU Prison Education Program. Currently, she’s a Virginia G. Piper Fellow-in-Residence and Clinical Assistant Professor at ASU.

Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, the Paris Review and others. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize in fiction for her collected stories, “Black Jesus and Other Superheroes” in 2017. She is the founder of the literary nonprofit Live, Write (livewriteworkshop.com), which provides free creative writing workshops for communities of color. Blackburn’s second collection of stories, “How to Wrestle a Girl,” was published in the fall of 2021. She is an Assistant Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.

#ArtLitPhx: Poet/Critic Rigoberto González: “A Life of Labor”

Superstition Review

ALifeofLabor-Rigoberto

 

 

Award-winning poet Rigoberto González talk “A Life of Labor” takes place on Tuesday, November 8 at 1:30 p.m. in the Fulton Center room 2490. ASU Tempe Campus.  His talk will focus on his writing career.

Rigoberto González is the author four books of poetry, most recently Unpeopled Eden, which won the Lambda Literary Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His ten books of prose include two bilingual children’s books, the three young adult novels in the Mariposa Club series, the novel Crossing Vines, the story collection Men Without Bliss, and three books of nonfiction, including Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, which received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He also edited Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing and Alurista’s new and selected volume Xicano Duende: A Select Anthology. The recipient of Guggenheim, NEA and USA Rolón fellowships, a NYFA grant in poetry, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, The Poetry Center Book Award, and the Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award, he is contributing editor for Poets & Writers Magazine and is professor of English at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey. In 2015, he received The Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle. As of 2016, he serves as critic-at-large with the Los Angeles Times and sits on the Board of Trustees of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). He earned graduate degrees from the University of California, Davis, and Arizona State University in Tempe.

This event is hosted by  the ASU Department of English and its Creative Writing Program, along with the Humanities Division of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. For more information, please visit the event page and/or the Facebook event.

#ArtLitPhx: A Poetry Reading by Rigoberto González

Superstition Review

 

RigobertoGonzalesMondayAward-winning poet Rigoberto González will be reading on Monday, November 7 at 7 p.m. at Arizona State University, Tempe Campus. This event is free and open to the public. Memorial Union’s Pima Auditorium will open its doors at 6:30 p.m.

Rigoberto González is the author four books of poetry, most recently Unpeopled Eden, which won the Lambda Literary Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His ten books of prose include two bilingual children’s books, the three young adult novels in the Mariposa Club series, the novel Crossing Vines, the story collection Men Without Bliss, and three books of nonfiction, including Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, which received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He also edited Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing and Alurista’s new and selected volume Xicano Duende: A Select Anthology. The recipient of Guggenheim, NEA and USA Rolón fellowships, a NYFA grant in poetry, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, The Poetry Center Book Award, and the Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award, he is contributing editor for Poets & Writers Magazine and is professor of English at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey. In 2015, he received The Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle. As of 2016, he serves as critic-at-large with the Los Angeles Times and sits on the Board of Trustees of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). He earned graduate degrees from the University of California, Davis, and Arizona State University in Tempe.

This event is hosted by  the ASU Department of English and its Creative Writing Program, along with the Humanities Division of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. For more information, please visit the event page and/or the Facebook event.

#ArtLitPhx: RED INK Journal Open House

Superstition Review

asu-open-house-redink-journal-2016-final The Arizona State University Department of English invites you to an open house in celebration of the RED INK International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, & Humanities. There will be indigenous food, and refreshments, along with poetry, stories, and music.

This event is free of charge and is open to the public. The event takes place on Friday, September 16th from 5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. at the Durham Language and Literature Building (LL), room, 215, ASU Tempe Campus. For more information visit the Facebook event or the official event page.

ASU Book Group: ‘Crossing the Line: A Marriage across Borders’ by Linda Valdez

Superstition Review

Crossing the Line book coverThe ASU Book Group is meeting Wednesday, Sep. 28, 2016 from 12-1 p.m. at the Piper Writers House (PWH) ASU, Tempe campus. The September 2016 reading selection of the ASU Book Group is “Crossing the Line: A Marriage across Borders” by local writer Linda Valdez. The book group is open to all in the ASU community and meets monthly from noon–1 p.m. in the Piper Writers House on ASU’s Tempe campus. Authors are generally present.

Not a typical immigration story, “Crossing the Line” is told by a middle-class American woman who falls in love with the son of an impoverished family from rural Mexico—a man who crosses the border illegally to be with her. Married in 1988, Linda and Sixto Valdez learn to love each other’s very different families and cultures, raising their child to walk proudly in both worlds. “Crossing the Line” cuts through the fears and preconceptions that fuel the continuing political turmoil over immigration. The book is available at amazon.com.

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2003, Linda Valdez is a columnist and editorial writer at the Arizona Republic/azcentral.com. She has written extensively about immigration and border issues. Her commentary opposing Arizona’s infamous anti-immigration laws earned her the Scripps Howard Walker Stone Award for editorial writing in 2011.

Other ASU Book Group meetings and selections for 2016-2017 include Oct. 26 (Matt Bell: “Scrapper”); Nov. 30 (Betty E. Hammer Joy: “Angela Hutchinson Hammer: Arizona’s Pioneer Newspaperwoman”); Jan. 25 (Michael Smith: “At Home with the Aztecs: An Archaeologist Uncovers Their Daily Life”); Feb. 22 (Tara Ison: “Ball”); Mar. 29 (Martin Beck Matuštík: “Out of Silence: Repair across Generations”); andApr. 26 (Melissa Pritchard: “A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, and Write”). Additional selections TBD.

The ASU Book Group is sponsored as a community outreach initiative by the Department of English and organized in partnership with the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.

Free of charge and open to the public.

Intern Post, Stephen McDonough: RED INK Magazine comes to ASU

Superstition Review

Screen Shot 2016-04-01 at 12.40.11 PMRED INK Journal is the new version of RED INK Magazine, a magazine started at the University of Arizona. RED INK Magazine was published for twenty five years, but now it has found a new home and a new name. Arizona State University English Regents Professor Simon J. Ortiz brought RED INK to Arizona State University and is working to make it a literary journal. Simon Ortiz is a well-known and well respected Acoma Pueblo poet and writer. The purpose of this journal is to promote a native voice through literature, art, and humanities. This serves two functions. First, it preserves native voices by collecting and publishing their writing. Second, it promotes native voices by distributing the journal and getting people to read native writings.

RED INK Journal is a periodical published bi-annually and is being run by Arizona State University grad students.. The journal aims to preserve the native voice with writing about land, culture, identity, and community. While RED INK Journal is relatively new, they are looking toward the future and hoping to grow. They are accepting creative writing, essay, and scholarly submissions. In the future, they would like to get submissions from global indigenous people.

The journal looks different from the magazine, but what remains the same is the promotion of the native voices. RED INK Journal is part of a larger initiative Ortiz is working on called RED INK International. RED INK International has the same goals as the journal: to promote and preserve the native voices. It wants to educate and get a native view point across to the public. RED INK International is working toward those goals, but through a different method than publishing a journal. Ortiz wants to put native voice out into the community. Not only is a native voice important to native peoples, it is an important part of America’s voice and history. Ortiz thinks it should be taught at all grade levels. RED INK Journal is just one of the ways to help get the native voice heard in the community.

To find out more about the journal and the RED INK initiative, click the links and check out this article. You can also follow them on Facebook to stay up to date with all the RED INK Journal news and happenings.