Lyrics and Dirges: A Monthly Reading Series

Lourdes Figueroa is an oral poet. Her poems are a dialogue of her lived experience when her  family worked in el azadón in Yolo County. The words el azadón are used by the ones who work in the fields — the work of tilling the soil under the blistering sun. She is the author of the chapbooks  yolotl and Ruidos = To Learn Speak, completed during her Alley Cat Books Residency. Her chapbook Vuelta was recently published by Nomadic Press. She received her MFA in Poetry at the University of San Francisco. She works and lives in San Francisco with her wife, filmmaker, Peggy Peralta. She is a native of limbo nation. Lourdes continues to believe in your lung and your throat.

Yeva Johnson, a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and musician whose work appears or is forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Essential Truths:  The Bay Area in Color Anthology, Obsidian, sin cesar, Sinister Wisdom, When We Exhale Anthology, Yemassee, and elsewhere, explores interlocking caste systems and possibilities for human co-existence in our biosphere.  Yeva is a past Show Us Your Spines Artist-in-Residence (RADAR Productions/SFPL), a Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellow at Mesa Refuge in 2022, and poet in QTPOC4SHO, a San Francisco Bay Area artists’ collective. She Co-edited Joan Nestle’s book A Sturdy Yes of a People, a Sinister Wisdom Sapphic Classic. Her debut chapbook, Analog Poet Blues, was published by Nomadic Press in 2023.

antmen pimentel mendoza (she, he) is the author of the chapbook MY BOYFRIEND APOCALYPSE (Nomadic Press, 2023). antmen is a writer, the Acting Co-Director of the Multicultural Community Center at UC Berkeley, and a student at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.

Carmen Estela Kennedy Saleh exercises a passion for truth and cultural meaning-making through her creative nonfiction, her autoethnographic work, and her support for burgeoning writers; to that end, she founded the Diasporic Peoples Writing Collective (DPWC), a platform for folks to join her in doing the same. Carmen is a perennial learner who is in the EdD Program at San Jose State University where she has been able to blossom and tend to her writing, some of which is published in the Themis and Acacia journals, and some recipient of a James D. Phelan literary award and a Solas Award in the category of culture and ideas. And…recently delivered by Nomadic Press is her firstborn: A Love Letter.