PALABRA PURA Special Presentation: Lorna Dee Cervantes & Rigoberto González

Nobody can't miss this amazing presentation of Palabra Pura with two of the most important Latino writers in the United States. I am VERY excited about meeting these two poets. No dejen de venir a Palabra Pura, va a ser una noche muy especial.

Date: Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Time: Doors open at 6:00 PM, Reading begins at 7:00 PM
Cost: Free admission.
Location: Center on Halsted, Chicago's LGBT Community Center, 3656 N. Halsted, Chicago



Lorna Dee Cervantes is an internationally acclaimed Chicana poet from San José, California. Her poetry has appeared in nearly 200 anthologies and textbooks, including The Norton Anthologies of Modern, American, English, Contemporary & Women's Poetry. She is a recipient of many honors, awards & literary fellowships including the NEA, Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Award and a Pulitzer nomination for DRIVE: The First Quartet. A fifth-generation Californian of Mexican and Native American (Chumash) heritage, Lorna Dee Cervantes was a pivotal figure throughout the Chicano literary movement. In 1976, she founded the influencial small press & Chicano literary journal, MANGO Publications, which was the first to publish well-known writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Ray Gonzalez and many others. Cervantes holds an A.B.D. in the History of Consciousness and was an Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She currently resides in San Francisco and teaches at SFSU and offers intensive poetry workshops from her home, the Mission Poetry Center. She is readying several new books of poetry for publication and completing her novel and a full-length screenplay. Visit her on her blog at http:lornadice.blogspot.com

Rigoberto González is the author of seven books, most recently of the memoir, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. A story collection, Men without Bliss, is forthcoming. The recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and of various international artist residencies, he writes twice a month a Latino book column, for the El Paso Times of Texas. He is contributing editor for Poets and Writers Magazine, on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle, on the Board of Directors of Fishouse Poems: A Poetry Archive, and on the Advisory Circle of Con Tinta, a collective of Chicano/ Latino activist writers. He lives in New York City and is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University/Newark.