March 3rd, Future Now: Antonia Silva, Cecilia Caballero, & Matt Sedillo

We’re back with our first Future Now reading series of the year! Hosted by Dryland LA literary journal, join us via Zoom to hear featured poets and guest Open Mic artists present their work, every first Thursday of the month.

In this event we call on all Black & Brown poets and writers to join us for our Open Mic & Reading Series, which features three authors published in literary journal Dryland LA. This month features include poets published in Issue 11, Antonia Silva and Cecilia Caballero. Slam champion, best political poet of America, and Re/Arte writer-in-residence, Matt Sedillo will be reading from his new poetry collection City on the Second Floor (Flowersong Press, 2022).

Zoom ID: 878 8950 0444

Fill out this google form to sign up for the Open Mic. 10 Slots available per reading!

Date: Thursday, March 3rd

Time: 7 pm – 9 pm PST.

About The Authors

Antonia Silva is a queer Mexican-American poet from Santa Ana, California who currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon. They were a 2021 Artist-in-Residence at the Independent Publishing Resource Center. Antonia’s work is published in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Rising Phoenix Review, and Dryland Literary Journal. Follow them on IG @n0palitx 

Based in Los Angeles, Cecilia Caballero is a creative nonfiction writer, poet, teaching artist, and coeditor of the book The Chicana Motherwork Anthology. As a teaching artist, Cecilia facilitates poetry workshops to create more communal spaces for healing and social justice. Her prose and poetry has been published in Dryland, Epiphany, Gathering: A Women Who Submit Anthology, Raising Mothers, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere. She is an alum of workshops and fellowships with Tin House, Macondoa, and the Women’s National Book Association and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart prize and a Rhysling award. Cecilia is currently working on her first book, a memoir titled Other Alive Creatures. Twitter: @la_sangre_llama 

Matt Sedillo has been described as the “best political poet in America” as well as “the poet laureate of the struggle” by academics, poets, and journalists alike. He has appeared on CSPAN and has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. He has spoken at Casa de las Americas in Havana, Cuba, at numerous conferences and forums such as the National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in American Higher Education, National Association of Chicana/Chicano Studies, The Left Forum, the US Social Forum and at over a hundred universities and colleges, including the University of Cambridge, among many others. He is the current writer in residence at Re/Arte and author of Mowing Leaves of Grass (FlowerSong Press, 2019), as well as City on the Second Floor (FlowerSong Press, 2022). 


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.

Writers, Roberto Lovato and Héctor Tobar, in Conversation at Re/Arte Centro Literario

Roberto Lovato, author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas, will be joined by another voice of the unheard, author and journalist Héctor Tobar, at Re/Arte literary center on Saturday, Nov. 6 from 6:30-8:30 p.m. Copies of Lovato’s groundbreaking memoir, named New York Times “Editor’s choice”, will be available for sale and signing.


Although Roberto resides at The Writers Grotto in his hometown, San Francisco, he is known for his story-telling journalism that covers violence and terrorism all over the world. As a Pulitzer grant recipient he has covered crises in Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador (where his
parents migrated from), Dominican Republic, Haiti, France, and the United States.


The conversation will be led by Héctor who’s New York Times bestseller, Deep Down Dark:
The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, allows him to understand Roberto’s
passion for sharing stories that are ignored for political and economic gain. They will be
discussing the memoir as well as giving insights on writing, literature, and publishing.


Re/Arte is a literary and art space run/owned by Viva Padilla. Re/Arte is the headquarters of Dryland, a literary journal born in South Central Los Angeles, Hombre Lobo, and Ponte LAs Pilas Press. Re/Arte looks to host a number of events such as film screenings, book readings, open mic nights, workshops, author talks, a literacy program for youth y más.

Sept. 7th, Grito de Boyle Heights Featuring Luis J. Rodriguez

Join us this Wednesday, September 7th, at Re/Arte Centro Literario for a reading & open mic featuring former L.A. poet laureate Luis J. Rodriguez!

Grito de Boyle Heights happens in-person at Re/Arte (2014 1/2 E. Cesar Chavez Ave. LA, CA 90033) every second and fourth Wednesdays of the month. Sign ups for Open Mic start at 6:45 PM, so we recommend arriving early! When you’re there, enjoy a cup of coffee catered by Mobar Coffee & Market.

Luis J. Rodriguez was born in El Paso, Texas, and grew up in the San Gabriel Valley of East Los Angeles. He is a Poet, novelist, journalist, activist, critic, and founding editor of Tia Chucha Press, and co-founder of Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore in the San Fernando Valley.

He is the author of 16 books in all genres, including the best-selling memoir, “Always Running, La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.” His latest memoir is the sequel, “It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing.” that recount his experiences as a former incarcerated individual and dealing with addiction and gang violence. His last poetry book is “Borrowed Bones” from Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press. In 2020, Seven Stories Press released his first book of essays, “From Our Land to Our Land: Essays, Journeys & Imaginings from a Native Xicanx Writer.” From 2014-2016, Luis served as the official Poet Laureate of Los Angeles.

We will have copies of Luis’s books in-stock at Re/Arte if you would like to grab a copy!

We also offer writing workshops every 2nd & 4th Wednesdays of the month at 4 PM, on a donation basis, with Chicano political poet Matt Sedillo at Re/Arte (no appointment necessary, drop-in). Other times for workshops check more details here.

See you soon!

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 locationRE/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.


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.

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!


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


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.

Bruja by Wendy Ortiz

Reviewed by Amanda Hildebrand

Following Excavation: A Memoir and Hollywood Notebook, Wendy C. Ortiz’s third experiment in memoir, Bruja, (Civil Coping Mechanisms, Los Angeles, 2016) is a similar manifestation of Ortiz’s self-evaluative journeys through the magic and mystery of inner consciousness. When presented with this dumping-ground of a one-time blog project, in which she recorded detailed accounts of her own dreams over months, composed of “threads” of themes and narratives instead of a followable structure, Ortiz and publisher Michael J. Seidlinger termed the book’s genre as “dreamoir.” In Bruja, Ortiz reminds us of the peculiar ways dreams present themselves: as symbols, as images, as reflections, as reminders themselves, each wrapped in an unconscious narrative that makes all dreams seem not only familiar, but connected. Ortiz lets her dreams speak their own surreal, uncertain truths, revealing inner worlds of memory and witchcraft that bound beyond their dream-forms.

Bruja implies autonomy of body and spirit. Through the excavation of what her deepest imagination is capable of, Ortiz is connecting with the bruja within herself, the witch who can read signs, interpret symbols, feel what those before her have felt. She’s calling to something deep: the collective woman, the universe’s sleeping magic — in order to discover something within herself, or perhaps discover a new self altogether.

For all the right reasons, Bruja is impossible to put down. It’s the spell of stepping into dreamland; and even though this is Wendy’s dreamland, we’ve been here before. Ortiz captures that “knowing” feeling required to enter and navigate dreams without exposition or confusion by also throwing us right in. She only presents simple images, and how they made her dream-self feel. Not quite poetry, prose, magic realism, memoir or dream journal — and definitely not fiction — Ortiz relies on our collective dream experiences to ground her formatless collection of images. Despite the chaos, it flows, because of Ortiz’s incomplex but chimeric language, and economic choices in details. The only plot points are the names of months every few pages, without dates or years, furthering the feeling of uncertainty of our place in time and space. Uncertainty is rampant in Ortiz’s dreamland, and her dateless, title-less dream entries are her first lesson in the trickster natures of our subconscious.

Our dreams can’t trick us until the “rules” of dreamland are established. Ortiz often uses “I knew” or “I understood” in her dream descriptions, calling to “that feeling” of “knowing” what’s happening in a dream the moment you’re submerged, no matter how strange or surreal. Before we even read Bruja we are aware of that feeling, but framed by Ortiz’s (a stranger’s) dreams, its role in creating collective dream narratives and meaning from those narratives becomes even more important – “that feeling” bridges our dream experience together. Another rule of dreamland: realism is impossible, but imagery stolen from real-life is essential to help establish “that feeling:” favorite faces, places we’ve been – maybe just a little bit different, but still familiar. Ortiz dreams of her old town of “Olympia-that-is-not-Olympia;” her mother – but not, because she is faceless; and somehow familiar strangers, introduced to once but now dragged back to the front of her mind. Things are off, but by the next day, the memory is forever altered in the subconscious by this new lens. Dreams create a reality within themselves, show us what-ifs, sourced from own our minds and memories that seemed so concrete before.

Because Ortiz presents dreams the way they present themselves, we’re left alone to make out their meanings. Often in Bruja, Ortiz’s dreams appear as bare-bone images with no hint at plot or story, focusing on the sensory experience of dreaming.

“My hair was being braided. The stranger doing it pulled my hair back from my scalp with a brush.
As they braided I could feel their hands moving in the motion of braiding.”

Ortiz doesn’t have to explain to us how she can “feel” this dream-stranger’s dream-hands in her dream-hair, because most of us have experienced this exact sensation of “feeling” — touching, tasting, smelling — while dreaming. Even while suspended in unconsciousness, our imaginations project physical sensations through our bodies; dreams have evolved past messages from beyond, and into conjurings. Dreams are charms, cursing us with feelings that rack our bodies without a conscious mind to register them. It’s a very mystical thought, evoking an image of bodies tortured by passions of religious fervor while their minds fight for sense; but the spell has already taken over, and we’re lost in senseless dreamland.

Ortiz’s personal connection to magic, mysticism, and brujería is emphasized throughout her body of work, and directly pointed to by the title of this collection; but explicit magic, wands and charms and leaky cauldrons, is missing from Bruja’s pages. We do find, repeatedly, imagery of blood, pregnancy, wombs, and water, amongst other symbolic evocations of magic, specifically brujería.

“I was caught in a flood.
I delivered the baby by C-section and carried the infant in my arms. I walked up to a gas station. There were bloodstains on the concrete garage floor…
I’ve just had a baby and I’m not afraid of anything, I thought.”

Bruja implies autonomy of body and spirit. Through the excavation of what her deepest imagination is capable of, Ortiz is connecting with the bruja within herself, the witch who can read signs, interpret symbols, feel what those before her have felt. She’s calling to something deep: the collective woman, the universe’s sleeping magic — in order to discover something within herself, or perhaps discover a new self altogether.

Ortiz’s dreams, like a lot of dreams, conjure disaster: floods, puberty, abortion, violence, abandonment. Our fears and anxieties are mirrored in surrealist dreamland, at times unrecognizable, at others copied almost beat-for-beat from “real life.” Dreams can recreate embarrassing mistakes that already happened, or terrifying possibilities for the future; they can poison us against doing things we’ve never even tried, or spoil our opinions of loved ones; because nothing is off-limits. Our dreams are parts of our narratives we are removed from, leaving more opportunity for spiraling out of control.

When a dream reaches into our cubbies of subconsciousness and yanks out a memory of a long-lost face or a home we’ll never return to, it re-stirs that memory within us and re-minds us, mind body and spirit, of a something that’s no longer here, but forever present in “that feeling.” Dreamoirist Wendy C. Ortiz’s Bruja shows us that a dream is a re-awakening of all of our selves, our experiences, our sensations; a magical revisitation from the past, and all its ghosts with unfinished business.


Bruja is available through Civil Coping Mechanisms