Join us for a presale reading of Coco Oliver's new collection of poems, dormilona. QR postcards will be available to make advance purchases: all author earnings for this book will be donated to MECA (Middle East Children's Alliance), for more information visit mecaforpeace.org.
dormilona is a bilingual book of poetry exploring dream states, distance, and the rituals of sleep. In this collection, the fluidity of language reflects the elusive nature of time and memory, centering on matrilineal consciousness and variable notions of home. The ancient forests surrounding Mount Roraima and the bright pink sands of Playa Colorada inhabit the speaker’s dreams, and in these topographies, she finds harmony with brain wave patterns drawn from sleep studies. Meaning both “nightgown” and “sleepyhead” in Venezuelan Spanish, dormilona weaves a neural network linking sleep to matrilineal memory, time, and geography.
Coco will be joined by María Esquinca, author of Where Heaven Sinks, a collection of poetry that received the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and is forthcoming next year., and East Bay poet Niambi Walker.
Coco Oliver is a poet and artist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her first book of poems, Cosmos A Personal Voyage by Carl Sagan Ann Druyan Steven Soter And Me (Operating System, 2017) is about nuclear disarmament. Her second book, Science Fiction Fiction (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020) is an homage to Miami-Dade County and color photography in the early aughts.
María Esquinca is a poet and journalist. A fronteriza, she was born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and grew up in El Paso, Texas. She is currently a producer for The Bay, a podcast out of KQED. Before that, she was a New York Women's Foundation IGNITE Fellow with Latino USA where she produced narrated and non-narrated episodes. In 2019, she was selected as a Report for America Fellow for Radio Bilingue, as the only full time reporter she covered the San Joaquin Valley. She wrote several stories about COVID-outbreaks at places like Avenal State Prison, the Mesa Verde Detention Center, and Foster Farms, one of the largest poultry producers. Before that, she interned with WLRN. In 2024 she won the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, chosen by Juan Felipe Herrera, for her forthcoming book of poetry Where Heaven Sinks(2025).
Niambi Walker (she/they) is a black, queer, writer, and spoken word artist born in Oakland, Ca and raised in Atlanta, Ga. She released her first chapbook "Accidentally Ordered an Espresso" in 2020. They have championed and featured at numerous slam poetry spaces and were a part of the 2022 Berkeley Slam Poetry Team. She strives to represent and unite her community through the written word focusing on experiences with identity, mental health, and the complexity of being human. Their next book "Cup Full of Bees" is set to release in January 2025.