Making poetry in color: The art of the Xicanx word is an intergenerational, multi-border storm of poets coming together to share their words in all the colors of the rainbow-raza Featuring Stalina Villareal and their debut book of poetry, Watcha (Vellum Press 2024), who is in the Town from Houston, Texas. Stalina will be joined by Oakland and San Francisco-based poets arnoldo colibri, hector son of hector and Lourdes Figueroa.
Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal (she/they) sees, hears, feels, and communicates across mediums and cultures. She’s a deep-watching ekphrastic poet, a photographic eco-essayist, a broad-stroke sketch artist, a sonic improv performer, a sound-sensitive literary translator, and an assistant professor of English. Their bilingualism stems from her 1.5-generation experience being both Mexican and Xicanx. Her debut collection of poetry called Watcha is out now from Deep Vellum Publishing. Their poetry can be found in the Rio Grande Review, Texas Review, The Acentos Review, Defunkt Magazine, and elsewhere. Her published translations of poetry include Enigmas by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Photograms of My Conceptual Heart Absolutely Blind by Minerva Reynosa, Kilimanjaro by Maricela Guerrero, and Postcards in Braille by Sergio Pérez Torres. Stalina is the recipient of the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry and one of the BIPOC Arts Network and Fund 2025 Artist Awards. Their visual poetry—spanning queer erotica, interactive digital art, and video installation—was part of the Antena@Blaffer exhibit at University of Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum. She is currently writing ekphrastic elegies about her interpretative drawings of portraits and a memoir about her photographs of nature—revealing her ability to look backward and within, to write new ways forward.
arnoldo garcía, colibri, (él, he, him) is originally from the south Texas border. He is a trans-language community-based poet-writer & organizer and the publisher/editor of editorial Xingao, a press dedicated to disseminating poets the color of the land. You can catch up on his work at artofthecommune.wordpress.com
hector son of hector is from Long Beach, CA and currently lives in Oakland. He is the child of Mexican immigrants, works in a hospital, dreams of short stories and writes poetry in secret.
Lourdes Figueroa is an oral queer chicanx poet & an award winning poetry filmmaker whose work is in dialogue of her lived experience when her family worked in el azadón—tilling the soil under the blistering sun. Lourdes is the author of the chapbooks yolotl, Ruidos = To Learn Speak, & most recent Vuelta from Nomadic Press. Her poem “Pieces from YOLOTL” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize 2022 by “Quite Lightning” & is a recipient of The San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literature Award for Poetry. Discover her latest poems in the Mexican Journal Tierra Adentro & latest film Las Marimacha Fragments made in collaboration with Filmmaker Peggy Peralta within 3rd Thing’s Press A Good Symptom: A Serial Anthology of Time Based Disturbances. Lourdes celebrates your pocha marimachita tongue. A native of limbo nation, she continues to believe in your lung & your throat.