516 WORDS: Poetry reading
with Demetria Martinez, Lisa Chavez and Israel Wasserstein
Friday, January 26, 2007, 8pm
Demetria Martinez is an author, activist, lecturer and columnist. Her books include Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana, winner 2006 International Latino Book Award in the category of Best Biography; the widely translated novel Mother Tongue, winner of a Western States Book Award for Fiction; and two books of poetry, Breathing Between the Lines and The Devil's Workshop. She writes a column for the National Catholic Reporter, an independent progressive newsweekly, and in New Mexico, she is active with Enlace Comunitario, an immigrants' rights group that serves Spanish-speaking victims of domestic violence.
Lisa D. Chávez is a creative writing professor at the University of New Mexico. She was born in Los Angeles and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska. She has published two books of poetry: Destruction Bay and In an Angry Season, and has been included in such anthologies as Floricanto Si! A Collection of Latina Poetry, The Floating Borderlands: 25 Years of U.S. Hispanic Literature, and American Poetry: The Next Generation. Her creative nonfiction has been published in Fourth Genre, The Clackamas Literary Review and other places. Before coming to UNM, she taught at the University of Alaska, in Poland with the Peace Corps, in Japan and in Rochester, New York.
Israel Wasserstein received his MFA from the University of New Mexico in 2006. He was born and raised on the Great Plains, but currently resides in Albuquerque, where he has grown used to green chile and waking with a view of the mountains. His poetry has appeared in Flint Hills Review, Red Mesa Review, BorderSenses and elsewhere.