Please join us Wednesday, April 18 as we continue the ninth season of readings. Bring a friend!
About the contributors:
 Brenda Bell Brown says, I know I’ve been changed. She has a clearer focus on why she does what she does in her attempts to use art—literary, pperformance, visual—as a vehicle for expression. A convergence of tiime and effort has taken place at this point of her vocational practice. They are her forms. It is her heart. Today’s climate of change has served to clarify their continuing agreement with her. From Brown University (theatre arts) to Hampton University (museum studies) to Hamline University (creative writing). She is skraight.
Sherrie Fernandez-Williams earned an MFA in writing from Hamline University and is a recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Award, a Beyond the Pure Fellowship, and an Intermedia Arts SASE/Jerome Grant. Sherrie was a Loft Mentor Series winner for Creative Nonfiction, a Jones’ Commission Award Winner through the Playwrights Center, and selected for the Givens Black Writers Collaborative Retreat. She has been published in various literary journals and anthologies and is the author of the memoir Soft.
Isela Xitlai Gomez-R. is an East LA/Inland Empire transplant who writes to piece together broken stories of family, trauma, and travel a la Southern California. Her art lays its roots in the spaces between jazz and mariachi, taco trucks and chili cheese burgers, oceans and desert, and now snow. Isela is a 2015 winner of the Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series in Poetry and Creative Nonfiction.
Michael Kleber Diggs is a poet and essayist. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s, Poetry City, North Dakota Quarterly, Paper Darts, Water~Stone Review and a few anthologies and collaborations. He is a past Fellow with the Givens Foundation for African-America Literature and a past-winner of the Loft Mentor Series in Poetry. His work has been supported by the Jerome Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Michael lives in Saint Paul with his wife, Karen, and their 16-year-old daughter.
Luis Lopez grew up in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. He has made his home in the Twin Cities for nearly a decade. He recently graduated with a degree in Creative Writing from Metropolitan State University and is considering pursuing a Master of Fine Arts.
Christine Stark is an award-winning writer, visual artist, and speaker of European, Anishinaabe & Cherokee ancestry. Her first novel, Nickels: A Tale of Dissociation, was a Lambda Literary Finalist. Her writing has appeared in University of Pennsylvania Law Review; Florida Review; The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prize Winning Essays; When We Become Weavers: Queer Female Poets on the Midwest Experience; and many others. Her poem, “Momma’s Song” was recorded by Fred Ho and the Afro Asian Music Ensemble. For more information: www.christinestark.com
About the editor:
Sherry Quan Lee, MFA, University of Minnesota, recently retired from teaching Creative Writing at Metropolitan State University. She is the author of Chinese Blackbird, a memoir in verse, published 2002 by the Asian American Renaissance, republished 2008 by Loving Healing Press/Modern History Press who also published, How to Write a Suicide Note: serial essays that saved a woman’s life, 2008. Quan Lee’s most recent publications include: Love Imagined: a mixed race memoir, a 2015 Minnesota Book Award Finalist, and the anthology How Dare We! Write: a multicultural creative writing discourse, 2017, both LHP/MHP. She was a poetry mentor for the 2015-2016 Loft Literary Center’s Series in Poetry and Creative Prose. |
