About 40 people attended the launch of "Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color Event" at the Poetry Foundation Sept. 4. The event featured readings from queer poets Francisco Aragon, Ruben Quesada, Ching-In Chen and Duriel E. Harris.
According to the foundation's website, "Nepantla is a new poetry e-journal being curated by Christopher Soto in collaboration with the Lambda Literary Foundation. The mission of Nepantla is to nurture, celebrate and preserve diversity within the queer poetry community."
Stephen Young, program director at the foundation, spoke about Nepantla and shared brief biographies of the poets ahead of their readings.
Author of two books, Puerta de Sol and Glow of Our Sweat and editor of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, Aragon has had his work published in a variety of journals and is also a faculty member at the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
Founder and publisher of Codex Journal, poetry editor for Colbalt Review and poetry curator for Luna Luna Magazine; Quesada teaches English and Creative Writing for the Performing Arts at Eastern Illinois University.
Author of The Heart's Traffic and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities, Chen is also a Kundiman, Lambda and Callaloo Fellow. Chen also serves as the Cream City Review's editor-in-chief and is the senior editor of The Conversant.
Co-founder of the avant garde poetry/performance trio The Black Took Collective and poetry editor for Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, Harris is also an associate professor of English at Illinois State University and is the author of two print collections Drag and Amnesiac: Poems.
Aragon shared a little bit about his writing process and read four of his poems one of which is dedicated to his sister who died 10 years ago from breast cancer.
Quesada explained that he grew up Catholic in south Los Angeles; although he didn't study it formally, art is featured in many of his poems. "I'm spiritual but there's something that the Catholic religion has infused in me so it finds its place in a lot of my work," said Quesada. In addition to reading poems focusing on art, Quesdada shared his poems focusing on his upbringing and the Catholic faith.
The poems Chen read were infused with an activist spirit and brought out an intense emotional reaction from Chen while Harris read an eclectic array of poems including one in which she sung portions of the passages.
See www.poetryfoundation.org for more information.