Elisa A. Garza is a native Texan who often writes the stories of her extended family, particularly the women of her family. Her writing revisions the people, landscapes, and language of past and present South Texas, where her family has lived for hundreds of years. Her first chapbook, Familia, won the 2001 Portlandia Group chapbook competition and was a best seller for the press.
You will find Elisa’s poems in many journals and anthologies, most recently Improbable Worlds, an anthology of the sacred from Mutabilis Press. Her essays have appeared in academic and instructional anthologies for college students. Elisa has received several awards, including a Literature Fellowship from the Texas Commission on the Arts and the Emerging Writer Award from the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation, funded by Sandra Cisneros.
Elisa teaches Women's Studies at the University of Houston, and she has also taught Inprint writing workshops for K-12 teachers and the Latina Girls Writing Group at Lanier Middle School. She was a volunteer for Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Our Say for several years; her work with that organization included mentoring young Latino writers during their applications to graduate school, with a one hundred percent acceptance rate.
Elisa blogs about mothering, teaching, and writing at www.tercets.blogspot.com, where the most popular posts are about healthy eating and Catholic family life. Visit the blog to correspond about readings, conferences, workshops, or other topics. Also, you can join or subscribe to the blog or “like” the Facebook page for Entre la claridad to receive updates about Elisa’s future publications and appearances.
"Elisa A. Garza "...raise[s] [her] arms / as if in prayer, as if to hug the sky...." to speak of many fronteras, geographical and emotional, poetic and pragmatic, calm and full of turmoil. These poems negotiate the space between her mother's experiences of womanhood, motherhood and relationship, and the life the poet wants-- a life "free / of the sharp stones and cactus needles / that stuck mother and sisters."Ire'ne Lara Silva
To purchase Elisa's chapbook, "Entre la claridad", click here.
Arisa White is an MFA graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of Disposition for Shininess (Factory Hollow Press, 2008); her play Frigidare was staged for the 2011 PlayGround Festival at Thick House Theatre in California. Recipient of the inaugural Rose O’Neill Literary House summer residency at Washington College in Maryland, she has also received residencies, fellowships, and scholarships from Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Hedgebrook, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Prague Summer Program, Fine Arts Work Center, and Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005, her poetry appears in numerous journals and is featured on the recording WORD with the Jessica Jones Quartet. She lives in Oakland, CA, and works as an editorial assistant for a dance, education magazine, and is co-editor of HER KIND, a blog for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.
"Arisa White evokes an 'emergency' state of being that speaks of and to any number of existences while never being confined to any easy context." Rebecca Seiferle
"Throughout Post Pardon Arisa White explores what's not here and here all the same. She is a fierceless and tender poet who always brings into view what's strange and unusual and critical for our survival. Her poems consider what it requires to meditate and meet what's unknown without flinching." Dara Wier
Juan Manuel Portillo is a Mexican poet, educator, scholar and translator born in Ciudad Juárez in 1967. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis). His poems and translations have been published in a variety of literary and cultural journals in México and the U.S., including
Anuario de poesía mexicana 2004, edited by Luis Felipe Fabre and Tedy López Mills, and published by Fondo de Cultura Económica. Portillo is co-editor of the broadside series
Hoja Frugal, and edited volume 6 of
Brujula, Interdisciplinary Review on Latin American Studies, along with Ana Alonso Minutti, and published by Hemispheric Institute of the Americas of UC Davis. His poetry collection,
passwords_ , is his first collection of poetry published in the United States.
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