Join beloved authors Beth Piatote and Aimee Suzara at Medicine for Nightmares for a reading and celebration of their newly released poetry collections, distant water and birth language.

Beth Piatote is a Nez Perce scholar, playwright, poet, and associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include The Beadworkers, which was longlisted for the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection and the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the scholarly monograph Domestic Subjects. Her play, Antíkoni, had its world premiere with Native Voices in Los Angeles in November 2024. Her poems, scholarly essays, and short stories have appeared in multiple journals and anthologies, including American Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, World Literature Today, and PMLA. An enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, Piatote is devoted to the study of her heritage language of Nez Perce and is an Indigenous language revitalization activist. She lives in Berkeley, California.

Filipino-American poet, playwright, performer, and educator Aimee Suzara is the author of the forthcoming poetry book BIRTH LANGUAGE (Tia Chucha Press, Aug 2026), SOUVENIR (Wordtech Editions 2014), which was a Willa Award Finalist, and two chapbooks, Finding the Bones and The Space Between. Her poems, prose and plays have appeared in Kartika Review, California Language Association Journal, Orion Magazine, Raising Mothers, Poets.org, Mom Egg Review, and Women Re-Creating Classics (Bloomsbury 2025), among others. Her commissioned play THE REAL SAPPHO was supported by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation New Works program and the National Endowment for the Arts. Suzara was a 2025 San Francisco Foundation / Nomadic Press Literary Award winner, and has been been awarded fellowships and residencies by Poetry and the Senses at UC Berkeley, Mesa Refuge, the Key West Literary Seminar, A Room of Her Own Foundation, Hedgebrook and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.  As a multidisciplinary performer, she has collaborated with dance theater and music ensembles such as Deep Waters Dance Theater and the Grammy-Award-winning Kronos Quartet. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Mills College.  Based in Oakland, California, she teaches writing at Bay Area colleges and universities and through her coaching business Wild Tongues.