Join us as we celebrate the 2nd edition release of “Exiled Moon” by Naomi Helena Quinonez. Dr. Quinonez will be joined by Genny Lim, Leticia Hernández-Linares, and Avotcja for an evening of powerrful poesia.
.Exiled Moon offers truth to power and bears witness to the injustices that relegate women and communities of color to the margins of society. This powerful collection of poetry probes the geographical, social and spiritual borders between humanity and inequality. Poignant observations are woven into richly textured explorations of the forms of exile created by patriarchal systems that separate humans from their sense of purpose and belonging. Femicide, colonization, racism, immigration, patriarchy are some of the issues confronted in this collection. The moon serves as a symbol for the divine feminine that is in exile from light of day. Poems in this collection also celebrate the power and resiliency of the collective spirit to resist and transcend injustice and to create new centers of existence away from the shadows of exile. Exiled Moon is a call to action to raise one’s fist, one’s voice or one’s own consciousness.
BIOS;
Dr. Naomi Helena Quiñonez is the author of three collections of poetry: Exiled Moon,The Smoking Mirror and Hummingbird Dream/Sueño de Colibri. She is a recent recipient of the San Francisco International Flor y Canto Festival Community Teyolia Award, the City of Berkeley Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry, the American Book Award, the Rockefeller Fellowship and is a San Francisco Yerba Buena Center for the Arts honoree. Her poems have appeared In Xochitl in Cuicatl: Floricanto: 100 years of chicanx/latinx poetry, Voices From the Ancestors, The Colorado Review, Infinite Divisions and Maestrapeace to name a few. Quiñonez co-edited Invocation L.A: Urban Multicultural Poetry and Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century. She has been a featured poet throughout the U.S., Mexico, Cuba and Spain. Quiñonez holds a PhD in American History and contributes to the scholarship of Chicana/Latina women.
Genny Lim is a recipient of the PEN Oakland Reginald Lockett and Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Awards and a 2024 grant recipient of The Creative Work Fund. She was San Francisco Jazz Poet Laureate (2016-2018). Her award-winning play Paper Angels has been produced throughout the U.S., in Canada and China. She is author of five poetry collections, Winter Place, Child of War, Paper Gods and Rebels, KRA!, La Morte Del Tempo, and co-author of Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, winner of the American Book Award.
Leticia Hernández-Linares is a bilingual, interdisciplinary, award winning, writer, artist, and racial justice educator. The first-generation U.S. born daughter of Salvadoran immigrants, she is the author of Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl & Alejandria Fights Back! ¡La lucha de Alejandria! Widely published, she is the co-editor of The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States and her work appears in Maestrapeace, San Francisco’s Monumental Feminist Mural and Other Musics: New Latina Poetry. She has performed her poemsongs, delivered keynotes, and presented on panels throughout the United States and in El Salvador. A five-time San Francisco Arts Commission grantee, she has lived, created, and protested in the Mission District of San Francisco for over two decades.
Avotcja (pronounced Avacha) is a card carrying New York born Music fanatic/sound junkie & popular Bay Area Radio DeeJay as well as founder/member of Avotcja & Modúpue (the Bay Area Blues Society’s Jazz Group Of The Year in 2005 & 2010). She’s a lifelong Musician/Writer/Educator/Storyteller & is on a shamelessly Spirit-driven melodic mission to heal herself. Avotcja talks to the Trees & listens to the Wind against
the concrete & when they answer, it usually winds up in a Poem or Short Story. Avotcja
has been published in English & Spanish in the USA, Mexico & Europe. She’s an award
winning Poet & multi-instrumentalist. Her latest Book is “With Every Step I Take”