Medicina Para Pesadillas is keeping the very special Mission tradition of poets reading on the street alive and well with this literary series. Come hang and enjoy poets reading their work to Calle Veinte Cuatro.

This month’’s features are Sara Borjas, Zander Moreno Lozano, Mimi Tempestt and Josiah Luis Alderete.

SARA BORJAS is a Xicanx pocha and a Fresno poet. Her debut collection of poetry, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff was published by Noemi Press in 2019. Sara was named one of Poets & Writers 2019 Debut Poets, is a 2017 CantoMundo Fellow, and the recipient of a 2020 American Book Award. She teaches innovative undergraduates at UC Riverside, lives in Los Angeles, and stays rooted in Fresno. Find her @saraborhaz or at www.saraborjas.com.

Mimi Tempestt (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist, poet, and daughter of California. She has an MA in Literature from Mills College, and is currently a doctoral student in the Creative/Critical PhD in Literature at UC Santa Cruz. Her debut collection of poems, the monumental misrememberings, was published by Co-Conspirator Press in 2020. In 2021, she was selected for participation in the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices & writers, and was a Creative Fellow at The Ruby in San Francisco. She is the 2023 recipient of the SFF/Nomadic Press Literary Prize in Poetry. Her second book, the delicacy of embracing spirals, was published by City Lights in 2024.. Her works can be found in Foglifter, Interim Poetics, and The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Zander Moreno Lozano is an Indigenous Mexican, transgender, poet born from the soil of Mexico City, Mexico. At 2 years old, he and his family immigrated to the United States to escape patriarchal abuse. Zander has been awarded fellowships with Brooklyn Poets, Queer Ancestor’s Project, Seventh Wave, and Genderfail. Zander’s poetry focuses on the intersection of identities, state violence, immigration, being transgender, and ancestral veneration. His poems have been previously published in The Hanging Lantern Review, ARTFAG, and The Ana.

Josiah Luis Alderete is a full blooded Spanglish speaking Pocho y left handed callejero de Aztlán who has been part of La Area Bahia’s spoken word scene for over twenty years. He is the curator and host of the long running Latinx reading series Speaking Axolotl and is the author of two books of poetry “Baby Axolotls & Old Pochos(Black Freighter Press 2021) and the chapbook “Fuchi Faces de los Estados Jodidos”(For The Pueblo 2023). In 2023 he was the Poetry Center’s Mazza Writer in Residence at San Francisco State. This year he is being published in Mexico by the Universidad Autonomy de Nuevo Leonin in an anthology of Mexican and Chicano poets called Hablando en Lenguas  Along with his bookstore sister Tân Khanh Cao  Josiah  tends the portal known as Medicina Para Pesadillas Bookstore y Galeria on 24th street in La Mision.