Celebrate the new book by Aimee Suzara, Birth Language, which centers a Filipina-American time traveling through her history, twisted and haunted like the roots of a balete tree. The book fuses English, Spanish, and Tagalog. It employs archival texts from as early as the 1500s when European conquistadors and explorers encountered the pre-colonial Philippine islands. Guided by the babaylan (shaman) and populated by mythical creatures like the mananngangal, kapre, and sireno, the collection celebrates a history of resistance, reclaiming and redefining the self despite colonization, assimilation, and cultural loss.
Aimee will share poetry from her book and converse with guest poets Yaccaira Salvatierra and David Maduli about shared themes in their work.
Aimee Suzara is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, performer, and educator Aimee Suzara is the author of the poetry book BIRTH LANGUAGE (Tia Chucha Press, Aug 2026), SOUVENIR (Wordtech Editions 2014), which was 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.
David Maduli is a father, educator, and author of Alemany Bay Window/Redwood Coast Record Crate (Sampaguita Press, 2024). His work, often inflected by many years as a DJ and school teacher, received the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. Born in San Francisco, he resides in Oakland, where he completed his MFA at Mills College with a fellowship in Community Poetics.
Yaccaira Salvatierra is a California-based poet, translator, mother and dedicated educator. She is the author of the poetry collection Sons of Salt (BOA Editions, 2024), which explores themes of maternal resistance, structural violence, and absent fathers. It was named one of the "Best Books for Adults" by the New York Public Library. She is currently translating Estancias de Emilia Tangoa by Peruvian poet, Ana Varela Tafur. She lives and teaches in Oakland.