Speaking Axolotl La Area Bahia’s long running monthly Latinx reading series happens the third Thursday of each month. Come gather and hear Decolonized Verses, Spanglish Poesia,, Latine Spoken Word and neighborhood chisme. This month we are over la luna excited to feature a very special Filipinx edition of Speaking Axolotl curated and hosted by the one and only Barbara Jane Reyes. Barbara will be joined by Janice Lobo Sapigao and Michelle Peñaloza.
10 slot open mic slot goes up a las 6;50pm
Janice Lobo Sapigao (she/her) is a Filipina American poet, writer, and independent scholar from the San Francisco Bay Area (unceded Ohlone land). She is a daughter of immigrants who grew up in a house with 12 people. She is the author of the poetry collections like a solid to a shadow (Nightboat Books, 2022) and microchips for millions (PAWA, Inc., 2016), along with two other chapbooks. She contributed three entries to The SAGE Encyclopedia of Filipina/x/o American Studies. She is an earrings collector, an introvert, an avid reader, and a July Leo. She is working on a novel. She is a 2023-2026 Lucas Arts Resident in Literary Arts at the Montalvo Arts Center. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Newberry Library in Chicago, IL, an AWP Writer-to-Writer Mentee in fiction, the 2020-2021 Santa Clara County Poet Laureate, and a Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets. She is a tenured Associate Professor of English at Skyline College where she works with community college students and directs the Honors Transfer Program. There, she received the Meyer Excellence in Teaching Award in 2023. She co-founded Santa Clara County’s Youth Poet Laureate Program as a chapter with Urban Word NYC, and she co-founded Sunday Jump Open Mic in Los Angeles’s Historic Filipinotown. She received a Ralph C. and Mary Lynn Heid Rare Materials Research Fellowship at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and she studied the Philippine History Special Collection archives in 2024. She will be a Mendel Fellow at Indiana University’s Lilly Library in 2025.
Michelle Peñaloza is the author of All The Words I Can Remember Are Poems, winner of the 2024 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award and the James Laughlin Award, awarded by The Academy of American Poets to recognize and support a second book of poetry forthcoming in the next calendar year. (Persea Books, 2025). She is also the author of Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, winner of the 2018 Hillary Gravendyk National Poetry Prize (Inlandia Books, 2019), and two chapbooks, landscape/heartbreak (Two Sylvias, 2015), and Last Night I Dreamt of Volcanoes (Organic Weapon Arts, 2015). Some of her honors include the Frederick Bock Prize from the Poetry Foundation as well as grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Community Foundation of Mendocino County, Upstate Creative Corps, 4Culture, Artist Trust, Literary Arts, and PAWA (Philippine American Writers and Artists). You can find her work at The Seventh Wave, Poetry, Honey Literary, Bellingham Review, New England Review, Lantern Review, and featured in American Life in Poetry. The proud daughter of Filipino immigrants, Michelle was born in the suburbs of Detroit, MI and raised in Nashville, TN. She now lives in Covelo, CA.
Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003), Poeta en San Francisco (TinFish Press, 2005), Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010), To Love as Aswang (Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc., 2015), Invocation to Daughters (City Lights Publishing, 2017), Letters to a Young Brown Girl (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2020), and Wanna Peek Into My Notebook?: Notes on Pinay Liminality (Paloma Press, 2022). Poems and essays have appeared in Asian Pacific American Journal, Chain, Hambone, Huizache, Maganda, Marías at Sampaguitas, Meridians, Ms. Magazine, New American Writing, New England Review, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, San Francisco Chronicle, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, South Dakota Review, Southern Humanities Review, The New York Times, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. An Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow, a recipient of the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, the Global Filipino Literary Award, and a San Francisco Press Club Journalism Award, she received her BA in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, her MFA at San Francisco State University, and she teaches in the Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program at University of San Francisco.