For his latest book launch, Alan Chazaro will be reading from These Spaceships Weren't Built For Us, a collection of speculative poems that reconsider the possibilities of space travel as the son of Mexican immigrants. Fresno Poet Laureate Joseph Rios writes that these poems "unlock portals of memory like the vinyl ridges on a record. His poems create temporal shifts and catalog neighborhood histories from Oakland to Jackson Heights. The poems are laced with references just for the homies. They're shoutouts. With These Spaceships Weren't Built for Us, Chazaro transforms the ranfla, the hooptie, and the G-ride into a spaceship, a time machine." Chazaro will be joined by his friends and poets, Sarah O'Neal, Kevin Madrigal, and Sara Borjas for a night of Bay Area literary celebration and astro gazing.
ALAN CHAZARO is the author of This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album, Piñata Theory and Notes from the Eastern Span of the Bay Bridge. He is a graduate of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley and a former Lawrence Ferlinghetti Poetry Fellow at the University of San Francisco. His work can be found in GQ, NPR, The Guardian, L.A. Times and more.
KEVIN MADRIGAL is a queer Chicano poet. He is a first generation hijo de su chingada madre from South San Francisco by way of Zapopan, Jalisco. When Kevin isn't writing, he teaches nutrition and cooking classes in la Misión. Kevin also helps organize When The Smokes Comes, a free creative writing workshop in Oakland that seeks to end oppression. Alan first met Kevin at a pulqueria in Guadalajara, while Kevin was wearing a hella fire Andre Iguodala jersey, and Kevin later visited Alan in Xalapa, Veracruz, to drink mezcal and too much coffee.
SARA BORJAS is a Xicanx pocha, a Fresno poet and a poetry editor at Noemi Press. Her debut collection of poetry, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff was published by Noemi Press in 2019 and won a 2020 American Book Award.Alanhas been Sara'sfanboysince her debut collection, and he washellaexcited and honored when she blurbed his first book.
SARAH O'NEAL is an artist and writer born and raised in the Bay Area. Her writing has been featured in the Institute for Palestine Studies, Lux Magazine, The Nation, and Bandcamp. When she's not writing you can find her scheming on the end of empire and leading community poetry workshops in Oakland with When The Smoke Comes. Alan would definitely lose to her in a soccer game, and admires her barista skills, among other talents.