Radical Poetry Reading with Maryam Ivette Parhizkar

Originally from Galveston, TX, Lupe Mendez (Writer//Educator//Activist) is the author WHY I AM LIKE TEQUILA (Willow Books, 2019), winner of the 2019 John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. He is the founder of Tintero Projects which works with emerging Latinx writers and other writers of color within the Texas Gulf Coast Region, with Houston as its hub. Lupe earned his Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Texas @ El Paso. Mendez’s work can been seen in print and online formats including the Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast Journal, the Texas Review, the L.A. Review of Books, Split This Rock, Poetry Magazine and Poem-A-Day from the Academy of American Poets. Mendez is the 2022 Texas Poet Laureate.

JD Pluecker’s undisciplinary work inhabits the intersections of writing, history, translation, art, interpreting, bookmaking, queer/trans aesthetics, non-normative poetics, language justice, and cross-border cultural production. They have translated numerous books from the Spanish, including Gore Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018) and forthcoming Trash by Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny (Deep Vellum Press). They are author of Ford Over (Noemi Press, 2016), and The Unsettlements: Dad. They previously worked as part of the transdisciplinary collaborative Antena Aire as well as the local social justice interpreting collective Antena Houston. JD has received the Warhol Arts Writing Grant and has exhibited work at Blaffer Art Museum, the Hammer, Project Row Houses, and more.

Poet Aliah Lavonne Tigh is the author of Weren’t We Natural Swimmers, a 2022 chapbook with Tram Editions out now, and her poems have appeared in Guernica, The Texas Review, Matter Monthly, The Rupture, and others. She holds poetry and philosophy degrees from the University of Houston and an MFA from Antioch Los Angeles. Tigh lives in Houston, Texas, and you can find her on Twitter at @ALoveTigh.

Irene Vázquez is a Black Mexican American poet and journalist based in Hoboken, NJ, who writes at the intersection of Black cultural work, placemaking and the environment. Irene’s debut chapbook Take Me To the Water was released by Bloof Books in October 2022. Irene works at Levine Querido, editing books about feisty twelve-year-olds, and this past spring was named a Brooklyn Poets Fellow for study in Bernard Ferguson’s workshop. In 2021, with the support of the Pulitzer Center, Irene reported on environmental justice advocacy and healing in Black and Indigenous communities on the Louisiana coast. Irene is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominated writer. When not writing, Irene likes drinking coffee, watching the WNBA, and reminding folks that the South has something to say.

Born into a Salvadoran and Iranian family in southwest Houston, Texas, Maryam Ivette Parhizkar is a poet, interdisciplinary scholar, and teacher. Her chapbooks include Somewhere Else the Sun is Falling into Someone’s Eyes (Belladonna Collaborative, 2019), As for the future (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2016) and Pull: a ballad (The Operating System, 2014). She is a doctoral candidate at Yale University, a member of CantoMundo, and a member of Tierra Narrative. With Óscar Moisés Díaz, she represented Tierra Narrative as a Curatorial Fellow at the Poetry Project in Spring 2021.