"that's what you get" Virtual Book Launch with Sheila Maldonado | FEB 12th, 7.00 PM EST
Featuring Lupe Mendez, Peggy Robles-Alvarado, Urayoán Noel and Yesenia Montilla
Brought to you by Word Up Community Bookshop/Librería Comunitaria
Join friends and writers to celebrate the second book of poems by Sheila Maldonado, Pisces from Coney Island, daughter of Honduras, at her home bookstore, Word Up. She launched her debut poetry collection, one-bedroom solo, in November 2011 at Word Up's first location at Broadway and 176th Street.
Friday, February 12th, 2021 (VIA ZOOM)
7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
ABOUT THE AUTHOR + FEATURED GUESTS
Sheila Maldonado is the author of the poetry collection one-bedroom solo (A Gathering of the Tribes / Fly by Night Press). She is a CantoMundo Fellow and Creative Capital awardee as part of desveladas, a visual writing collective. She teaches English for the City University of New York. She was born in Brooklyn, raised in Coney Island, the daughter of Armando and Vilma of El Progreso, Yoro, Honduras. She lives in El Alto Manhattan.
Writer, educator, and activist Lupe Mendez is the author of the poetry collection Why I Am Like Tequila (Willow Books, 2019), winner of the 2019 John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. His essays and prose have appeared in Latino Rebels, Norton’s Anthology of Sudden Fiction Latino, Literal, and Kenyon Review. His poetry has appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Texas Review, Hunger Mountain, Gulf Coast, and Poetry Magazine, among others. Mendez's recent work is forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2021. Mendez lives in Houston, where he dedicates energy as the founder of Tintero Projects. He works as a public school educator and currently serves as Poets & Writers' Literary Outreach Coordinator for Houston.
Peggy Robles-Alvarado is a Dominican and Puerto Rican Jerome Hill Foundation Fellow in Literature, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a 2020 Atticus Review Poetry Contest winner. She is also a BRIO award winner with fellowships from CantoMundo, Desert Nights Rising Stars, The Frost Place, and VONA. With advanced degrees in education and an MFA in Performance Studies this former teen mother, and initiated priestess in Lukumi and Palo celebrates womanhood and honors cultural rituals. She’s a three-time International Latino Book Award winner who authored Conversations With My Skin (2011), and Homage To The Warrior Women (2012). Through Robleswrites Productions, she created The Abuela Stories Project (2016) and Mujeres, The Magic, The Movement, and The Muse (2017). Her work has been featured on HBO Habla Women, Lincoln Center, and her poetry appears in several anthologies including The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext (2020), and What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). For more visit Robleswrites.com.
Urayoán Noel is the author of eight books of poetry, including Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico (2015) and the forthcoming Transversal, both from the University of Arizona Press. He has also published the prize-winning study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press, 2014), and he has been a finalist for the National Translation Award and the Best Translated Book Award for his translations of Latin American poetry. Originally from Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, Noel lives in the Bronx and is an associate professor of English and Spanish and Portuguese at New York University.
Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet & a daughter of immigrants. Her poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, & others. She received her MFA from Drew University & is a CantoMundo graduate fellow. Her first collection, The Pink Box, was longlisted for a PEN award in 2016. Her second collection, Muse Found in a Colonized Body, is forthcoming (Four Way Books, 2022).
that’s what you get (Paperback)
Brooklyn Arts Press, release date 2/ 1/21
$16.00