Katerina Canyon and Raúl Sánchez will be doing an in-person poetry reading at Village Books in Bellingham, WA on April 16, 2022 from 7:00 – 8:00PM.
Katerina Canyon is an Award-Winning Poet, Best Selling Author, civil rights activist, and essayist. She will be reading from her new poetry collection Surviving Home, which was released on November 9, 2021. Surviving Home is a collection of poems that serve as a memoir of the trauma she experienced and overcame. Concisely arresting and challenging the beliefs of family and the fantasies of tradition, the poems in Surviving Home show that home is a place that you endure rather than a place where you are nurtured. With unyielding cadence and unparalleled sadness and warmth, Katerina Canyon contemplates the prejudice and limitations buried in a person’s African American heritage: parents that seem to care for you with one hand and slap you with the other, the secret desires to be released from the daily burdens of life, as well as the surprising ways a child chooses to amuse herself. Finding resilience in the unexpected, this collection tears down the delicate facades of family. Katerina Canyon is a 2021, 2020, and 2019 Pushcart Prize Nominee. Her stories have been published in The New York Times and The Huffington Post.
Raúl Sánchez will be reading from his new poetry collection When There Were No Borders. These poems present and re-present our “tongue,” our “language,” our “culture and pride.” Steeped in history and “blood blood blood” unforgotten and dignified, these poems are never what you expect yet are as familiar as an ancestral landscape. Deeply layered like culture itself, this book es una flor, multi-petalled, many-voiced – sin frontera and utterly unique. From rich love poems to Neruda-esque declamaciónes to canciones and cantos, this book represents as we were, and are, When There Were No Borders, by presenting the multiverse that is US of America through the voice of one, Raúl Sánchez, crossing borders.
Raúl Sánchez is the former City of Redmond Poet Laureate 2019 – 2021. He teaches poetry in Spanish through the Seattle Arts and Lectures (WITS) program, also through the Jack Straw Educational Project. In the last three years he volunteered for PONGO Teen Writing at the Juvenile Detention Center. He runs the “Poetry in the Park” event at the Meadowbrook Pond in NE Seattle. His work has appeared in a multitude of journals, magazines, and anthologies. His new collection When There Were No Borders was released by Flower Song Press, McAllen Texas July 2021. His latest book is All Our Brown Skinned Angels.
Village Books is located at 1200 11th St, Bellingham, WA 98225. For more information, please visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/katerina-canyon-and-raul-sanchez-poetry-in-person-tickets-304284943457