Radical Poetry Reading with Cecilia Vicuña

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, activist and filmmaker whose work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the early 1970s. She coined the term “Arte Precario” in the mid-1960s in Chile, as an independent and non-colonized category for her precarious works composed of debris, structures that disappear in the landscape, which include her quipus (knot in Quechua), envisioned as poems in space. The author of more than 30 books, Vicuña is the recipient of numerous awards, and solo exhibitions of her work have been held at a number of major institutions, most recently the Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile (2023).

Roberto Harrison is the author of eight books of poetry: Tropical Lung: exi(s)t(s) (Omnidawn, 2021), Tropical Lung: Mitologia Panameña (Nion Editions, 2020), Yaviza (Atelos, 2017), Bridge of the World (Litmus Press, 2017), culebra (Green Lantern Press, 2016), bicycle (Noemi Press, 2015), Counter Daemons (Litmus Press, 2006), OS (subpress, 2006), as well as of many chapbooks. He was Milwaukee Poet Laureate for 2017-2019 and is also a visual artist.

Author, translator, and critic Cristina Rivera-Garza’s recent publications include El invencible verano de Liliana (PRH, 2021) and Grieving. Dispatches from a Wounded Country, translated by Sarah Booker (The Feminist Press, 2020), a finalist of the 2021 NBCC Awards. She is Distinguished Professor and founder of the PhD Program in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston, Department of Hispanic Studies. She is a MacArthur Fellow 2020-2025.

Writer and artist Sarah Riggs is the author most recently of The Nerve Epistle, a book of letter poems newly out with Roof Books this November 2021. Her translation from the French of Etel Adnan’s TIME with Nightboat won the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award in 2020. Riggs is also the producer of Outrider, a forthcoming film on and with the poet and performer Anne Waldman, working together with the director and cinematographer, Alystyre Julian. Riggs is a podcaster of Invitation to the Species with Tamaas, and has a daily artistic practice of working with ink and acrylic. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner Omar Berrada, and their two daughters.

Writer and artist Saretta Morgan lives in Phoenix, Arizona where she teaches Creative Writing at Arizona State University and contributes to the humanitarian aid efforts of No More Deaths Phoenix. She is the author of the chapbooks room for a counter interior (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2017) and Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018). Saretta holds degrees in writing from Columbia University and Pratt Institute. Most recently she has received grants and fellowships from Arizona Commission on the Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is at work on Alt-Nature, her first full-length collection.