Featured Readers
Wednesday, May 5 ~ Alameda Island Poets on Zoom
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Hosted by: Nanette Deetz and Cathy Dana
Featured readers: Georgina Marie Guardado, Loa Niumeitolu, and MK Chavez. Our Youth Poet is Mae Spiegel from Alameda Community Learning Center.
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Hosted by: Nanette Deetz and Cathy Dana
Featured readers: Georgina Marie Guardado, Loa Niumeitolu, and MK Chavez. Our Youth Poet is Mae Spiegel from Alameda Community Learning Center.
Georgina Marie Guardado
Georgina Marie Guardado is a poet from Lakeport, Northern California. She is the current Lake County Poet Laureate for 2020-2022, the first Mexican-American and youngest to serve in this role for Lake County, and is the new Volunteer Literary Coordinator for the Lake County Arts Council. She has served as co-editor for the Middletown Art Center’s RESILIENCE and RESTORE collections of written word and visual arts, and is an assistant poetry editor for Rivet Journal, an online literary journal from Red Bridge Press. As part of the Broken Nose Collective, an annual chapbook exchange, she created her first poetry chapbook Finding the Roots of Water (2018) and her second chapbook Tree Speak (2019). In 2020 she was an Anne G. Locasio scholar for the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference Poetry Workshop and became the new Poet in Residence for Karma Compass. She is currently working on her full-length poetry manuscript and a series of personal essays. Visit her website at GeorginaMariePoet.
Georgina Marie Guardado is a poet from Lakeport, Northern California. She is the current Lake County Poet Laureate for 2020-2022, the first Mexican-American and youngest to serve in this role for Lake County, and is the new Volunteer Literary Coordinator for the Lake County Arts Council. She has served as co-editor for the Middletown Art Center’s RESILIENCE and RESTORE collections of written word and visual arts, and is an assistant poetry editor for Rivet Journal, an online literary journal from Red Bridge Press. As part of the Broken Nose Collective, an annual chapbook exchange, she created her first poetry chapbook Finding the Roots of Water (2018) and her second chapbook Tree Speak (2019). In 2020 she was an Anne G. Locasio scholar for the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference Poetry Workshop and became the new Poet in Residence for Karma Compass. She is currently working on her full-length poetry manuscript and a series of personal essays. Visit her website at GeorginaMariePoet.
Loa Niumeitolu
Loa Niumeitolu is a Tongan poet. Her work appears in Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English; Homelands: Women’s Journeys across Race, Place, and Time; Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought; Muliwai: Hawai'i Review; and was featured on BBC Radio Scotland. As an educator and organizer, she has worked with(in) Mataliki: Tongan Writers Group in Tonga; Ex-Prisoners and Prisoners Organizing for Community Advancement in Worcester, Massashusetts; Pacific Islander women and men prisoners in Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla and California State Prison, Solano; and co-founded the Two Spirit Takataapui LGBTQ indigenous support groups: One Love Oceania, Oyate Tupu‘anga, and Spirit Root Medicine People. She currently works as a farmer.
Loa Niumeitolu is a Tongan poet. Her work appears in Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English; Homelands: Women’s Journeys across Race, Place, and Time; Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought; Muliwai: Hawai'i Review; and was featured on BBC Radio Scotland. As an educator and organizer, she has worked with(in) Mataliki: Tongan Writers Group in Tonga; Ex-Prisoners and Prisoners Organizing for Community Advancement in Worcester, Massashusetts; Pacific Islander women and men prisoners in Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla and California State Prison, Solano; and co-founded the Two Spirit Takataapui LGBTQ indigenous support groups: One Love Oceania, Oyate Tupu‘anga, and Spirit Root Medicine People. She currently works as a farmer.
MK Chavez
Latinx writer MK Chavez is the author of Mothermorphosis (Nomadic Press) and Dear Animal, (Nomadic Press.) She is a recipient of a 2017 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award. She is a fellow with CantoMundo, co-founder and co-curator of the reading series Lyrics & Dirges, co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival, and guest curator of the reading series at UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in the Fall of 2018.
Latinx writer MK Chavez is the author of Mothermorphosis (Nomadic Press) and Dear Animal, (Nomadic Press.) She is a recipient of a 2017 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award. She is a fellow with CantoMundo, co-founder and co-curator of the reading series Lyrics & Dirges, co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival, and guest curator of the reading series at UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in the Fall of 2018.