Sept. 2nd, Future Now Reading: Olga García Echeverría, Jo Foderingham Brown, & Edward Vidaurre

Join us this coming Thursday, September 2nd, for the sixth installment of our monthly Reading & Open Mic Series, Future Now. Hosted by Assistant Editor Nikolai Garcia & the Dryland team. This month we are featuring contributors from Issue 10 and Issue 9: Olga García Echeverría, Jo Foderingham Brown, & Edward Vidaurre.

This will be a hybrid reading & open-mic event as it’s happening in-person at Re/Arte Centro Literario, located in Boyle Heights, and virtually via Zoom if you are only able to join us online!

When: Thur. September 5th, 7-9 pm PST.

In-person location: RE/ARTE  2014 1/2 E CESAR E CHAVEZ AVE. LOS ANGELES, CA 90033

Zoom ID: 878 8950 0444

Fill out this google form to sign up for the Open Mic. Whether you’re attending on-site or via zoom you’ll get a chance to share your poems. Only 10 spots are available, sign up as soon as possible!

Open Mic Guidelines:

• Be ready to unmute yourself when your name is called and please mute yourself again once you are done sharing. 
• Open-mic readers will have three minutes to share. Please be respectful of our other readers’ time. We will use the mute button at our discretion. 
• We will not tolerate any hate speech. (No racism, sexism, homophobia, etc). 

Help us get the word out by sharing the flyer on Instagram, FB, or Twitter and invite a friend to come hang out! This is a great opportunity for anyone looking to showcase their poetry and connect with artists of the Los Angeles community and beyond.

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Olga García Echeverría (Issue 10)

Olga García Echeverría (she/her/ella), born and raised in East Los Angeles, California, is the author of Falling Angels: Cuentos y Poemas (Calaca Press and Chicha Press). Her poetry and essays appear in numerous anthologies, print magazines, and online literary venues. She has been an educator in the literary arts for over 25 years and currently teaches literature in the Chicanx Latinx Studies department at California State University of Los Angeles. For the past decade, under the leadership of Poets & Writers and California Center for the Book, she has worked as a bilingual workshop leader for the Rural Libraries Tour, which facilitates creative writing workshops in rural and underserved areas of California. She and Maylei Blackwell are the literary executors for the beloved Colombian American lesbian poet and publisher tatiana de la tierra.                                                  

Jo Foderingham Brown (Issue 10)

Jo (Foderingham) Brown (she/her/he/him) is a Black, queer, gender non-conforming woman from Georgia, currently living in DC. She has been writing since childhood and started performing her work in 2016. Common subjects of her work are misogynoir, Blackness, interpersonal relationships, and her Jamaican heritage. You can keep up with Jo at tallawahthoughts.co

Edward Vidaurre (Issue 9)

Edward Vidaurre is an award winning poet and author of seven collections of poetry with his eighth collection Cry,Howl forthcoming in 2021. He is the former 2018-2019 City of McAllen,TX Poet Laureate, a five time Pushcart Prize nominated poet and publisher & editor-in-chief of FlowerSong Press and its sister imprint Juventud Press. Vidaurre is from Boyle Heights, CA and now resides in McAllen, TX with his wife and daughter.

Aug. 5th, Future Now Reading: Devynity Wray, Luivette Resto, & Monique Quintana

Join us this coming Thursday, August 5th, for the fifth installment of our monthly Reading & Open Mic Series, Future Now. Hosted by the Dryland team. This month we are featuring contributors from Issue 10: Monique Quintana, Luivette Resto, & Devynity Wray.

This will be a hybrid reading & open-mic event as it’s happening in-person at Re/Arte Centro Literario, located in Boyle Heights, and virtually via Zoom if you are only able to join us online!

When: Thur. Aug. 5th, 7-9 pm PST.

In-person location: RE/ARTE  2014 1/2 E CESAR E CHAVEZ AVE. LOS ANGELES, CA 90033

Zoom ID: 878 8950 0444

Fill out this google form to sign up for the Open Mic. Whether you’re attending on-site or via zoom you’ll get a chance to share your poems. Only 10 spots are available, sign up as soon as possible!

Open Mic Guidelines:

• Be ready to unmute yourself when your name is called and please mute yourself again once you are done sharing. 
• Open-mic readers will have three minutes to share. Please be respectful of our other readers’ time. We will use the mute button at our discretion. 
• We will not tolerate any hate speech. (No racism, sexism, homophobia, etc). 

Help us get the word out by sharing the flyer on Instagram, FB, or Twitter and invite a friend to come hang out! This is a great opportunity for anyone looking to showcase their poetry and connect with artists of the Los Angeles community and beyond.

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Devynity Wray is a writer and visual artist from Queens, NY whose work makes the trajectory of the African diasporic heritage, experience and legacy prominent. As a writer, Wray earned her chops on New York’s slam poetry scene making the Nuyorican Poet’s Café her stomping ground. She was a Nuyorican Poet’s Café Grand Slam Finalist and team member in 2002. Wray graduated from City University of New York’s Hunter College with a B.A. in Africana, Puerto-Rican and Latino Studies and recently earned her M.F.A. in Visual Arts from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. Wray is currently compiling words for her debut collection of poetry.

Luivette Resto, a mother, teacher, poet, and Wonder Woman fanatic, was born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico but proudly raised in the Bronx. Her two books of poetry Unfinished Portrait and Ascension have been published by Tía Chucha Press. Some of her latest work can be found on the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center website, Bozalta, and North American Review. Her third collection is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press. She lives in the San Gabriel Valley with her three children aka her revolutionaries.  

Monique Quintana is from Fresno, CA, and the author of Cenote City (Clash Books, 2019) and the chapbook My Favorite Sancho and Other Fairy Tales (Sword and Kettle Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in Pank, Wildness, Winter Tangerine, Cheap Pop, Okay Donkey, and other publications. You can find her book reviews and artist interviews at Luna Luna Magazine, where she is a contributing editor. She was the inaugural winner of Amplify’s Writer of Color Fellowship, and she has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and the Pushcart.  Her writing has been supported by Yaddo, The Mineral School, the Sundress Academy of the Arts, the Community of Writers, and the Open Mouth Poetry Retreat.  She teaches English at Fresno City College. You can find her on Instagram at @quintanadarkling and moniquequintana.com.

July 1st, Future Now Reading: Jessica Ceballos, Tricia Lopez, & Lituo Huang

Join us this coming Thursday, July 1st, for the fourth installment of our monthly Reading & Open Mic Series, Future Now. Hosted by the Dryland team. This month we are featuring contributors from Issue 10: Jessica Ceballos, Tricia Lopez, & Lituo Huang.

This will be our first hybrid open-mic event as it’s happening in-person at Re/Arte Centro Literario located in Boyle Heights, and virtually via Zoom.

When: Thur. July 3rd, 7-9 pm PST.

In-person location: 2014 1/2 E CESAR E CHAVEZ AVE. LOS ANGELES, CA 90033

Zoom ID: 878 8950 0444

Fill out this google form to sign up for the Open Mic. Only 10 spots available!

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Jessica Ceballos (y Campbell) is daughter of Mexican immigrants of North African, Wixárika, Iberian, and US Indigenous descent. She has lived many lives and prefers the one she now occupies—writer of brand content, poetry, essays, and screenplays; publisher of poetry anthologies; significant other; and co-parent of a three year old and two cats. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies and journals, and she has published three chapbooks. In 2019, she opened Alternative Field, a multilingual poetry library, reading room, resource center, and press that employs poetry to exercise thought around important issues. She’s currently working on a poetry-memoirish book inspired by the 80s, Disneyland, the foster care system, childhood divorce, displacement, secrets, and lies, entitled Happiest Place on Earth. Jessica was born, raised, and currently lives on Tovaangar—unceded Tongva lands.  www.jessicaceballos.com

Tricia Lopez is a Nicaraguan and Salvadoran writer from Los Angeles. She is the former Editor-in-Chief of MORIA Literary Magazine. She has had poems, stories, and author interviews published in Dryland, The Acentos Review, Rabid Oak, The Hellebore, Marias At Sampaguitas, and other places. She graduated from Woodbury University with a BA in Professional Writing and is now getting her MFA in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University.

Lituo Huang lives in Los Angeles with her dogs. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in TriQuarter, The McNeese Review, Dryland, and elsewhere. She is working on a novel. www.lituohuang.com

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Open Mic Guidelines:

• Be ready to unmute yourself when your name is called and please mute yourself again once you are done sharing. 
• Open-mic readers will have three minutes to share. Please be respectful of our other readers’ time. We will use the mute button at our discretion. 
• We will not tolerate any hate speech. (No racism, sexism, homophobia, etc). 

Help us get the word out by sharing the flyer on Instagram, FB, or Twitter and invite a friend to come hang out! This is a great opportunity for anyone looking to showcase their poetry and connect with artists of the Los Angeles community and beyond.

Juliana Chang’s debut, “Inheritance,” wins the 2020 Vella Chapbook Contest

The editors of Dryland congratulate author Juliana Chang for the release of her debut poetry collection, Inheritance; winner of the 2020 Vella Contest and published by Paper Nautilus Press in March, 2021. Her poem, “Mom’s Makeup” was featured in Dryland, Issue 10. 

The 2020 Vella Contest was judged by Lisa Mangini, Editor in Chief of Paper Nautilus—a small press founded in 2011 as an annual literary magazine, but since 2016 it has focused solely on publishing chapbooks. Chang’s debut poetry collection is the first release out of three more co-winners of the contest, which include Jason B. Crawford, Sarah Nichols, and Marc Sheehan. 

Juliana Chang is a Taiwanese American writer and filmmaker. She is the recipient of the 2019 Urmy/Hardy Poetry Prize, the 2017 Wiley Birkhofer Poetry Prize, and a 2015 Scholastic Art & Writing Gold Medalist in Poetry. Most recently, her poems “one day when I become a museum” and “Elegy for Jane” earned her a nomination for Best New Poets 2021.  

Follow her on Instagram @julianawritespoems and on Twitter @julianawrites.

Click here to order a copy of Inheritance, available through Paper Nautilus Press. 

‘Inheritance’ Cover Art

Tongo Eisen-Martin named San Francisco’s 8th Poet Laureate

The editors of Dryland congratulate Tongo-Eisen Martin for being selected as San Francisco’s 8th Poet Laureate by city Mayor London Breed. 

Eisen-Martin is a previous contributor of Dryland; his poems “I Do Not Know the Spelling of Money” and “I Make Promises Before I Dream” were featured in Issue 10 in 2020. He joins the honorary list of Bay Area poets laureate that include Devorah Major, Alejandro Murguía, and Kim Schuck; In 1998, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of City Lights Books, was the first poet to be awarded the title. 

In 2018, City Lights published Eisen-Martin’s chapbook Heaven is All Goodbyes for their Pocket Poet series, which won several book awards, including the 2018 American Book Award. Born and raised in San Francisco, Eisen-Martin’s latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, “We Charge Genocide Again,” has been used as an educational and organizing tool nation wide. 

In a press conference via zoom with Mayor Breed, Eisen-Martin delivered a speech reflecting his commitment to the Bay Area community as a poet, movement worker, and educator in order to create cultural work that is transformative and conducive to liberation. “A poet of any station is secondary to the people. A poet of any use belongs to the energy and consciousness of the people,” he said, “my aim as San Francisco poet laureate is to join with that energy in order to create vehicles of unity. Events, workshops, readings, are all vehicles for unity. I will never tire building as many as this city can handle.”  

His second book in the City Lights Pocket Poet series will be released in fall 2021.

E.M. Franceschini wins 2020 Anzaldúa Poetry Prize

The editors of Dryland congratulate issue 10 contributor Eric Morales Franceschini for his upcoming chapbook “Autopsy of a Fall,” winner of the 2020 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Poetry Prize. The annual award is provided by Newfound, a non-profit publisher based in Austin, Texas. As listed on their website, the prize awards a poet whose work “explores how place shapes identity, imagination, and understanding. Special attention is given to poems that exhibit multiple vectors of thinking: artistic, theoretical, and social, which is to say, political.” 

Franceschini is a previous contributor of Dryland; his poem “Caracoles” was featured in issue 10 in 2020.  The author was born in Puerto Rico and is a former day laborer and U.S. Army veteran who now holds a PhD from UC Berkeley. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Latin American Studies at the University of Georgia. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Somos en escrito, Moko, Chiricu, among others.

The Anzaldúa Prize panelists alongside guest judge Marcelo Hernandez Castillo (author of poetry collections Cenzontle and Dulce) chose Franceschini’s chapbook out of three additional finalists. The prize also includes a $1,500 award plus 25 copies of the published manuscript, however, Franceschini is allocating all royalties to the Undocupoets Fellowship Fund and The Colectiva Feminista en Construcción in Puerto Rico.  

“Autopsy of a Fall” will be published by Newfound in fall 2021.