Sunday, March 30, 2008

Happy Birthday, Steve!!

Happy Birthday to my brother, Steve Cervantes!

And to Eric Clapton & Tracy Chapman. And, of course, Cesar.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Lorna Dee Cervantes, 3-27, Sacramento State U - Where In The World Is Lorna?

La Raza Galeria Posada: 30 Years of Literature, Art y Cultura
March 14 – April 19, 2008
CSUS Library Gallery

Program:

CANTO: Poetry and Song @ CSUS
Thursday, March 27, 7pm in the CSUS Library Gallery
Free

Featured poets:
Lorna Dee Cervantes is an internationally acclaimed Chicana poet whose poetry has appeared in nearly 200 anthologies and textbooks. She has performed her poetry twice at the Library of Congress and numerous other venues, university & college campuses in the US, Mexico, Spain & Colombia. Her book, DRIVE: The First Quartet, is five separate collections under one cover and was awarded the Balcones Award for Best Book of Poetry, placed 2nd for Best Book of Poetry Written in English from the International Latino Book Awards, and was nominated for a Pulitzer. Cervantes currently resides in San Francisco.

Frank LaPena an internationally exhibited painter and published poet. As a young man, he became interested in the song, dance, and ceremonial traditions of his tribe. He has worked with the elders of the Nomtipom Wintu, the Nomlaki Wintun of Northern California, and elders of neighboring tribes, and he is a founding member of the Maidu Dancers and Traditionalists, dedicated to the revival and preservation of these Native arts.

Diego Carrillo is a spoken word poet. He began to write at the age of seventeen while traveling and studying in México. He has been featured at La Raza Galeria Posada, the Poetry Unplugged series at Luna's Café, Sacramento City College, Matrix Art Gallery, the Brick House, Borders Books and the Suga Shack Open Mouth Poetry event at CSUS. He has read with José Montoya, Raul "Tapon" Salinas and Talam Acey.

Music:
Esteban Villa is the co-founder of the RCAF and an internationally renowned artist and muralist. He is also an accomplished musician and composer. Villa’s songs are rooted in Country and Western Music and in the various musical traditions of Mexico, especially rancheras and corridos. However, it was his involvement with the Chicano Movement of the 1960’s that brought social issues in his own musical work. His new cd, Heartaches and Jalapeños, celebrates all these influences and melds them into music that is uniquely his own.

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"Poem For the Fifth Anniversary (And One Year After You)"

Poem For the Fifth Anniversary
(And One Year After You)





I'm hearing surf in the traffic,
a constant that reminds me of you.
A single passing in the dark
madrugada, this stillness
dripping city before the gunnings
and get aways resume.

I caught you in the updraft,
uplifted. Can't say, let down.

While all around, Babylon is falling,
a constant rain over the plains,
a plain hunger and an aggressive counting,
the military budget adding another coffin
to the mix, another fine spray
of brains in Iraq. The helicopters fly
over the rooftops of this nation —
the ever-sighting unto Paradise,
the explosive way home.

I want to pass now, into another
dream, hold a first class box
to my next life opera, be the head
soprano; comfort. Love, I want
to comfort the dead. One million
two hundred thousand dead
in this undeclared war—a dispersion
of traffic, an oil slick on water.
No sign of slowing down.

You want to wake
from this nightmare?
It takes more than a vote,
more than an enterprise,
than austere suits and a pen,
more than a grave
or the well-filled gravy
boat, more than caring.

Every root taps. Every seed waits
or wakes up.



Lorna Dee Cervantes
3/20/08

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Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Lorna Dee Cervantes at SF Galeria de la Raza Lunada March 21 - Where In The World Is Lorna?

Place: Galería de la Raza
2857 24th St. @ Bryant
San Francisco,CA 94110

Date: Fri., March 21
Time: 7:30pm
Admission: $5 or Free with food dish

LUNADA: Literary Lounge & Open Mic
Featuring Lorna Dee Cervantes & The Genie


Join us in March for the hyperreal, scratch guitar sounds of San Francisco’s own, The Genie and legendary Xicana poet, Lorna Dee Cervantes, winner of the American Book Award.

Lorna Dee Cervantes was born in 1954. She is the author of From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (Arte Público Press, 1991) and Emplumada (1981), which won an American Book Award. She is also co-editor of Red Dirt, a cross-cultural poetry journal, and her work has been included in many anthologies including Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (eds. Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan, 1994), No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Women Poets (ed. Florence Howe, 1993), and After Aztlan: Latino Poets of the Nineties (ed. Ray González, 1992). In 1995 she received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award.

The renown pioneer of "scratch guitar", The Genie blends blues, jazz, electronica, bossa nova, latin and middle-eastern rhythms via slide guitar, beatboxing, and live sampling, to create a visually stunning and truly unique show.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Lorna Dee Cervantes at UC Berkeley Floricanto March 13 - Where In The World Is Lorna?

Lorna Dee Cervantes Spring Calendar

I'll be presenting tonight, March 13, at UC Berkeley along with Aya de Leon, Las Manas Tres, Gaby Erandi Rico and others. It will be in the Heller Lounge which is on the second floor of the Martin Luther King Student Union (above the ASUC convenience store), on the corner of Bancroft Avenue and Telegraph Avenue. The entrance to the lounge is located to the right of the stairs leading to Pauley Ballroom and to the left of the clothes store. I'll be reading about 6:30 pm. See you there!

I'll also be reading in San Francisco, at the Galeria de Raza's Lunada series, March 21st.

And, I'll be at Sacramento State on March 27; Yuba Community College on April 8; San Francisco City College on April 9. And, reading for Palabra Pura in Chicago on April 16 along with Rigoberto Gonzalez. More updates soon.

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