Are you ready to celebrate Janel Pineda’s Lineage of Rain? With special guests: Kay Ulanday Barrett, féi hernandez, Vanessa Angélica Villareal AND Jihyun Yun?! Hosted by José Olivarez?! Y’all: get ready for the real.

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Speakers:

Janel Pineda is a Los-Angeles born Salvadoran poet and educator. She has performed her poetry internationally in both English and Spanish, and been published in LitHub, PANK, The BreakBeat Poets, Vol. 4: LatiNext, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the U.S. among others. As a Marshall Scholar, she holds an MA in Creative Writing and Education from Goldsmiths, University of London. Janel’s debut poetry chapbook, Lineage of Rain, is forthcoming from Haymarket Books.

Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, performer, and cultural strategist. Barrett’s latest book More Than Organs received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award in Literature by the American Library Association. They have featured at The Lincoln Center, The U.N., Symphony Space, The Poetry Project, Princeton University, NYU, The Dodge Poetry Foundation, The Hemispheric Institute, and Brooklyn Museum. They’ve received fellowship invitations from MacDowell, Lambda Literary, Drunken Boat, VONA, The Home School, VCCA, Monson Arts, and Macondo. They are a 3x Pushcart Prize nominee and 2x Best of the Net nominee. Their contributions are found in The New York Times, The Advocate, Asian American Literary Review, Vogue, PBS News Hour, The Rumpus, Academy of American Poets, Colorlines, Bitch Magazine, Frontier Poetry, Autostraddle, NYLON, and more. They have written two poetry books, When The Chant Comes (Topside Press, 2016) and More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020). They currently reside in NYC/NJ and remix their mama’s recipes with the company of their jowly dog.

féi hernandez (b.1993 Chihuahua, México) is an Inglewood-raised immigrant trans non-binary visual artist, writer, and healer. Currently, they are the President of the Advisory Board for Gender Justice Los Angeles. They have been published in Poetry, Oxford Review of Books, Frontier, NPR’s Code Switch, BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT, PANK Magazine amongst others. féi is the author of Hood Criatura (Sundress Publications, 2020). féi collects Pokémon plushies.

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award and the author of the award-winning collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series, 2017), a 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Paris Review, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Rumpus, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Buzzfeed Reader, and Poetry Magazine, where her poem “f = [(root) (future)]” was honored with the 2019 Friends of Literature Prize. She is a recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo and Jack Jones Literary Arts, and is a doctoral candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is raising her son with the help of a loyal dog. Find her on Twitter @Vanessid.

Jihyun Yun is a Korean American poet from the San Francisco Bay Area. Winner of the 2019 Prairie Schooner Prize in poetry, her debut collection Some Area Always Hungry [an urgently beautiful collection] was published by University of Nebraska Press in September 2020. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Adroit, Narrative Magazine and elsewhere.

José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/ Jean Stein Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. It was named a top book of 2018 by The Adroit Journal, NPR, and the New York Public Library. Along with Felicia Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he co-edited the poetry anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. He is the co-host of the poetry podcast, The Poetry Gods. In 2018, he was awarded the first annual Author and Artist in Justice Award from the Phillips Brooks House Association and named a Debut Poet of 2018 by Poets & Writers. In 2019, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.