HITCHED: LATINO L.A. will celebrate Latino heritage month by featuring a wide range of Latino poets and writers including PALABRA editor-in-chief ELENA MINOR with RUBEN R. MENDOZA, author of The Art of Exile WILLIAM ARCHILA with emerging poet HAROLD TEREZÓN, and LIZ GONZALEZ with LAURA LONGORIA.
Venice Blvd.
Venice, California
ELENA MINOR is publisher and founding editor of PALABRA, a magazine of Chicano and Latino Literary Art. Her fiction and poetry have been published in RHINO, Mandorla, Hot Metal Bridge, OCHO, Quercus Review, Puerto del Sol, Diner, City Works, Poetry Midwest, 26, Segue and BorderSenses, among others. A seasoned arts administrator, she also teaches creative writing to high school students. She is also a first prize recipient of the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize in drama..
Elena Minor RUBEN R. MENDOZA is a Chicano writer from East San José, California. Since 1990, he has lived, worked, and performed in Los Angeles as a writer, scholar, educator, community organizer, and digital documentarian and artist. He has taught Chicana/o Studies at East Los Angeles College and English composition at California State University, Northridge. Currently, he is a student in the English doctoral program at UC Riverside, where his scholarly work focuses primarily on performance, storytelling, rhetoric, urban space, and digital media production, in the decolonial praxis of contemporary Chicana/o art.
Ruben R. Mendoza
WILLIAM ARCHILA was born in Santa Ana, El Salvador, and earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon. His poems have been published in The Georgia Review, AGNl, Poetry International, The Los Angeles Review, Notre Dame Review, Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, and Portland Review among others. He is a PEN Center USA West Emerging Voices fellow. He has been awarded the Alan Collins Scholarship at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He has also received a nomination for a Pushcart Prize in 2010. In his first book The Art of Exile Archila asks readers to engage with a subject seldom explored in American poetry: the unrest in El Salvador in the 1980’s and its impact on Central American immigrants who now claim this country as home. The Art of Exile is the recent winner of the Emerging Writer Fellowship Award from the Writer’s Center and the International Latino Book Award. It is also featured in “First Things First: The Fifth Annual Debut Poets Roundup” — the Jan/Feb 2010 issue of Poets & Writers. Ruben R. Mendoza "A poet of the heart and head, of the personal and public, at times WILLIAM ARCHILA'S poignant poems make me hear and feel an echo of Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo," from the introduction by Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize winner.
William Archila LIZ GONZALEZ's family has been in Inlandia for 5 generations, since early 1900. liz’s work has most recently appeared in Inlandia Literary Journal, BorderSenses Literary Art Magazine, and Don’t Blame the Ugly Mug Anthology and has been honored with the Arts Council for Long Beach's 2005 Professional Artist Fellowship, an artistic grant from The Elizabeth George Foundation, and a residency at Hedgebrook: A Retreat for Women Writers. She is also a member of the Macondo Writer’s Workshop. liz teaches comp. at Long Beach City College and creative writing at community workshops and through the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. For more info: lizgonzalez.com
Liz Gonzalez HAROLD TEREZÓN was born in Los Angeles, CA. He has studied at the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State University. He was awarded the Rosenthal Emerging Voices in 2006. His work has appeared in Blue Print Review, Amistad, Borderlands, Puerto del Sol, and PALABRA. He currently teaches poetry and the importance of higher education to students in the Salvadoran Corridor and resides in Reseda, CA, working on his first collection of poetry.
Harold Terezón A native Angeleno, LAURA LONGORIA has been writing since high school, sporadically, but writing and was first published in her high school literary magazine. Laura was also published in a poetry portfolio anthology of the Echospace Poetry Collective and has read her work on KPFK. For more than four years, Laura co-hosted and produced the La Palabra monthly poetry reading at Avenue 50 Studio. During those four years, poets Alurista, Naomi Quinones, Luis Rodriguez, and a plethora of other Los Angeles area poets were featured at La Palabra.
Laura is currently working on a book of her poems.
Laura Longoria
