New Writing Series Winter 2019

Vanessa Angélica Villareal was born in the Rio Grande Valley borderlands to formerly undocumented Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series, 2017), winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters, and featured as a best-of book at The Los Angeles Times, NBC News, BOMB, Literary Hub, Bustle, and Entropy. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Boston Review, The Academy of American Poets, BuzzFeed, Epiphany, PBS Newshour and elsewhere. She is a CantoMundo Fellow, and is currently pursuing her doctorate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is raising her son with the help of a loyal dog.

Ronaldo Wilson, PhD, is the author of four collections: Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, Poems of the Black Object, Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other, and Lucy 72. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Ford Foundation, Kundiman, MacDowell, the National Research Council, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Center for Art and Thought, and Yaddo, Wilson is a mixed media artist, dancer and performer, who has performed in multiple venues, including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, UC Riverside’s Artsblock, Georgetown’s Lannan Center, Dixon Place, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Louisiana State University’s Digital Media Center Theater. He is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at U.C. Santa Cruz.

Statement:

In (yum) recent works, I explore poetry (caw) as mode is embedded and amplified in the body of live performance—elastic, changing, morphing.  As such, my practice (tick) encounters race and sexuality as the radicalized body, across various modes of form and content. Masks, Drag, Props, Locations, Others, Music, Dance, Sound, Body—these animate, for me, what is (tr/ead) borne out in performance [improvised spoken poetry, recordings, filming] combined with hybrid written modes and visual (y.why.i) media. Through a layering of text, painting, audio (.) and video, I explore (ding) what might be the (gut/z) stakes of reconciling and recognizing emotional (spri/te) routes into questions of race, sex, desire across content and form attentive to my always expanding (cap) process through experiment, play, and inquiry.

Kate Bernheimer is the author of a novel trilogy and the story collections Horse, Flower, Bird and How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales and the editor of four anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award winning and bestselling My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales. Her recent novella, Office at Night, co-authored with Laird Hunt, was a finalist for the 2015 Shirley Jackson Awards. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona where she teaches creative writing and courses on transnational fairy tales and fairy-tale aesthetics. Her nonfiction has appeared such places as The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Marvels & Tales: The Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, and The New York Times. With her brother, Andrew Bernheimer (Assistant Professor, Parsons/The New School & principal, Bernheimer Architecture), she is co-editor of Fairy Tale Architecture, an interdisciplinary series published by Places Journal.

This weekend conference ( March 1- 3 ) responds to the vital need for minority writers to construct spaces for creating, critiquing and publishing their work. Co-hosted with UC San Diego's SPACES , the conference will offer panels on topics such as writing in diasporic communities, navigating predominantly white MFAs, and finding literary agents and publishers willing to work with #OwnVoices authors. This event is free and open to the public.

For more information: https://www.facebook.com/pg/CenteringtheMargins/about/