Still Time to Register for Lorna Dee Cervantes's Intensive Poetry Workshop This Sunday, 7/12, 10-4 pm, Live Oak; 7/14 Reading in Bookshop Santa Cruz

Now Is Your Chance to Sign Up for the Poetry Workshop with Lorna Dee Cervantes
Sunday, July 12, 2009, 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM. At a private residence in Live Oak near Capitola.
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, and in hundreds of literary magazines. She founded and directed “Floricanto Colorado,” showcasing Xicano & Xicana literature in Denver and surrounding school districts, which, among other events, helped to bring about the proclamation of “Abelardo ‘Lalo’ Delgado Day in Denver.” The recipient of two NEA Fellowship Grants for poetry, several California and Colorado State grants, and a Pushcart Prize for Best Poem, she was recently a finalist for Poet Laureate of Colorado, along with Reg Saner and Mary Crow, who holds the position.
Cervantes holds an A.B.D. in the History of Consciousness. Her first collection of poetry to appear in 15 years is Drive: The First Quartet (Wings Press, Jan. 2006). She is currently Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado in Boulder where she is finishing sick-leave and beginning a sabbatical to complete her book of literary nonfiction, I Know Why the Quetzals Die: An Education. She is presently confounded by the prospect of peddling her screenplay, Pigmeat: The Life and Times of Memphis Minnie, a 20-year project, to Oprah.

The workshop will include writing new work and response to a poem brought in by each participant. Participants should bring to the workshop 14 copies of the poem for which response is desired. They should also send that poem and four others as an email attachment by Friday, July 10, indicating which one is for response.

Cost: $50. Limited to 13 participants. Advance registration and payment required. To reserve a place, call Adela Najarro at (831) 600-7319. Email: adelanajarro@comcast.net. Checks made out to Poetry Santa Cruz should be mailed to the address below. Call first to make sure there is room. Then send in your check to hold your place.

Adela Najarro
1610 Thompson Ave.
Santa Cruz, CA 95062

Where In The World Is Lorna? To Quote Michael Jackson...

I'll be there.

Alfred Arteaga (May 3, 1950-July 4, 2008)

"The sorrow of war inside a soldier's heart was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love. It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk. It was a sadness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past. The sorrow of the battlefield could not normally be pinpointed to one particular event, or even one person. If you are focused on any one event it would soon become a tearing pain."

~ Bao Ninh, THE SORROW OF WAR: A Novel of North Vietnam

He would have hated
Dying on the 4th. How sad
He'd say. And then he'd laugh.

His last words to me:

"We could drive home together. I'll tell you some lies."

Rest in color, mi companero.

Alfred Arteaga

May 3, 1950-July 4, 2008

Fourth of July In The Mission

Fourth of July In The Mission

for Alfred Arteaga


Fireworks and sirens
A little girl screams, "Daddy!"
Cries. You died last year

Everyone going
A pink velveteen jumpsuit
She's already gone

Because you loved me
All the colors remind me
Of ones you wanted

Where is hummingbird?
You loved like that: a bright
Awakening. You?

Too soon. Your laughter
On this morning an echo, a trace
Derrida's stammer

You would have hated
Dying on the 4th. How sad
You'd say, and then laugh

How lit up I was
That first foto, your return
From the dead. Again

For you I would have
Dyed my hair, magenta or
Chartreuse, would have dyed

Not so morose, your
Memory, last words to me
"I'll tell you some lies"

Why didn't I go?
"We could drive home together"
Would have been our last

Discolándia
Open. Manú o Maná
I'll buy one for you

Today I'll toast to
Revolution at Sunrise
Watch men with your hair

This Fourth of July
I'll think of you, relove you
Fireworks and sirens


7/4/09