TONIGHT: Lunada featuring me and Lorenzo from Kórima Press

“LUNADA celebrates the end of a stellar Fall season, with guest curator SARAH GUERRA and featured artists of KORIMA PRESS. Published poets and spoken word vets MAYA CHINCHILLA and LORENZO HERRERA Y LOZANO will dish out a literary banquet to keep us nourished until our Spring season begins again in February. The OPEN MIC SIGN-UP is at 7:15PM, where first timers and veteranos, musicians, poets, and thespians are always welcome to share their lunar inspiration in our literary lounge.

~ OPEN MIC SIGN-UP AT 7:15PM
~ SANDRA GARCIA RIVERA – Host & Curator
~ $5 ADMISSION (Free with Galeria membership or dish of food to share)

GALERIA DE LA RAZA
2857 24th Street (at Bryant)
San Francisco, CA 94110
info@galeriadelaraza.org
http://www.galeriadelaraza.org

Held every month on the night of the full moon, LUNADA Literary Lounge & Open Mic is a community gathering where stories, food, songs, and spirit are shared. For over a decade, Lunada has been the Bay Area’s only full moon, bilingual literary ritual and performance gathering. Located in the heart of the Mission District at Galería de la Raza, and guest-curated by some of the Bay Area’s most dynamic word slingers and artists, each Lunada features community poets, local legends, visiting mystics, and other mero meros of the stage.

ARTIST BIOS

Sarah Guerra is a native Tejana living in California since 2001. She is the current Operations Manager for Brava Theater Center, and Production Manager at the Queer Cultural Center. She previously curated La Peña Cultural Centers artistic programs and functioned as the staff liaison to the Ford Foundation Future Aesthetic Cohort and National Performance Network.

Maya Chinchilla is a Central American/Guatemalan poet performer, video artist, and educator. She is a founding member of the performance group “Las Manas” and has over 15 years of performance, theater and curation experience investigating and celebrating the intersection of politics, media and love. She founded and co-edited La Revista at UC Santa Cruz and has published her work in Las Girlfriends, Stanford’s Americas y Latinas, Mujeres de Maiz, Sinister Wisdom, Turtle Island to Abya Yala: A Love Anthology of Art and Poetry by Native American and Latina Women and most recently the MALCS blog Mujeres Talk. She directed MADE IN BRAZIL: Dreams at Work about a innovative non-profit in Brazil; THE LAST WORD about Las Manas, a fierce women of color artist collective; she associate produced the award winning documentary Reading Between the Rhymes, about the use of hip hop in education, and also shot and edited the video for the live theater show “Amor Cubano: In a bottle, a tube and a small packet.” Her most recent video project “SOLIDARITY BABY” is the poetic journey of a child of the Central American solidarity movement using poetry and images from her memory to build bridges between her family history and present day immigrant rights struggles, made with the support of the San Francisco Film Arts STAND Award and QWOCMAP. Maya also co-edited with Karina Oliva Alvarado, a collection of U.S. Central American poetry: Desde el Epicentro: Central American Poetry and Art. She is currently working on a book of poetry (Korima Press 2014), and has taught classes with intersections of literature, creative writing, gender, sexuality, immigration, Chicano/a, Latino/a, Central American culture and history at SFSU and teaches English as part of the Adelante program at the Peralta Colleges.
http://www.mayachapina.com

Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano is a Queer Xicano writer of Rarámuri descent, the author of the Lambda Literary Award-nominated Santo de la Pata Alzada: Poems from the Queer/Xicano/Positive Pen (Evelyn Street Press, 2005), and the forthcoming Amorcito Maricón. Along with Adelina Anthony and Dino Foxx, Lorenzo is a co-author of Tragic Bitches: An Experiment in Queer Xicana & Xicano Performance Poetry (Kórima Press, 2011), and the editor of Queer Codex: Chile Love (allgo/Evelyn Street Press, 2004), an anthology of visual and literary works by queer men of color from across the U.S.; Queer Codex: Rooted (allgo/Evelyn Street Press, 2008), a mix-genre anthology by queer women and trans-identified writers and visual artists; and, Joto: An Anthology of Queer Xicano & Chicano Poetry (Kórima Press, 2013). His work appears in Mariposas: A Modern Anthology of Queer Latino Poetry (Floricanto Press, 2008), edited by Emanuel Xavier, as well as the journals, ZYZZYVA: the journal of West Coast writers and artists; and, Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought. A member of Sandra Cisneros’ Macondo Workshop, Lorenzo was trained and mentored by Sharon Bridgforth and the late Ana Sisnett and raúlrsalinas. Lorenzo holds a Masters in Liberal Arts from St. Edward’s University and is the founder of Kórima Press, an independent publishing effort aimed at fomenting Queer Chicana/o and Xicana/o literary art.

SANDRA GARCIA RIVERA ~ Soulful Boricua poet chanteuse. Curator and Host of Lunada ~ Literary Lounge & Open Mic”