Charla Cultural Charla Cultural

We’re moving clouds with Ingrid Rojas Contreras.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras is an award-winning author who was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, Guernica, and Huffington Post, among others. She is the book columnist for KQED, the Bay Area's NPR affiliate.

We’ll start with a clip of from Rojas Contreras’ performance at City of Asylum in July 2019, then we’ll transition to an interview we just did with Ingrid, some conversation, and finally we’ll get to what we’re reading and some thoughts for the road. We'll be talking spiritualism, writing and identity, as well as that time I tried to buy some contraband and ended up with Something Special.

We’re LOOKING BACK at Jazz Poetry.

Jazz Poetry has celebrated the fusion of music and language for over 18 years.  Musicians and poets are brought together by City of Asylum to experiment, collaborate, connect and to express themselves freely, yielding performances greater than their parts . Over the years, Jazz Poetry has featured hundreds of artists from hundreds of countries.

This episode is really special, an opportunity to dig through performances from the City of Asylum archive 2011-2019. Unless you were sitting in the audience at the COA tent, or Alphabet City, at any of these performances,  you’ve never heard these before. We’re really excited to share.

We’ll Open with a performance by Sonia Sanchez from 2011. Then we’ll follow up with the incredible medley featuring Justin Philip Reed, Ilya Kaminsky,  Jenny Johnson, and Yusef Komunyakaa. All the music, the amazing jazz, is brought to you by Jazz Poetry musical director Oliver Lake and various musicians he’s recruited to join him across the years.

We’re eating fire with Jose Hernandez Diaz

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He holds degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and Antioch University Los Angeles. His work appears in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Green Mountains Review, Huizache, New Orleans Review, North American Review, The Progressive, Witness, among others. He has served as an editor for Floricanto Press and Lunch Ticket. His manuscript was a finalist for the 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize.

We'll be talking astrology, Frida Kahlo, and the different definitions of "pocho."

Daniel Borzutzky is the author of Lake Michigan, finalist for the 2019 Griffin International Poetry Prize; The Performance of Becoming Human, which received the 2016 National Book Award. His other books include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (2015); Memories of my Overdevelopment (2015); and The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011). He teaches in the English and Latin American and Latino Studies Departments at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
We’ll start with a Daniel Borzutzky's March 2021 performance at City of Asylum, then we’ll transition to an interview we just did with Borzutzky, some conversation from us, and finally what we’re reading and some thoughts for the road. We're talking joy, the love that survives, and how our country became used to massacre. 

We're turning tables with Patrick Rosal. 

Patrick Rosal is the award winning author of four books of poetry: Boneshepherds, My American Kundiman, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, and Brooklyn Antediluvian. He is a Guggenheim fellow and lives in New Jersey.

We'll be talking white space in poetry, our sister cultures, and scatological poetics. We'll also talk about my upcoming appearance on Jeopardy!, some pointers for reading poetry aloud, and about words that simply cannot be translated.

We’re peeling oranges with Ada Limón.

Ada Limón is the award-winning author of the poetry collections The Carrying, Bright Dead Things, and several other books, poems, and essays.

We'll be talking about voice, faith, and answering the most impossible question of all: what is poetry? We'll also be talking about comics and revenge monsters.