About
Join us for the culminating event of our 2019 Poets-in-Residence program. Tonya Foster and Alan Peláez López will perform their poetry at a reading to celebrate their work created during the Poets-in-Residence program at MoAD. Joining Tonya and Alan will be MoAD Poetry Coordinator and 2018 Poet-in-Residence Raina Léon, and the Ruth Assawa San Francisco School for the Arts Spoken Arts Director Aimee Suzara.
This program will include a wine reception.
Tonya M. Foster was raised in New Orleans, LA. She is an Assistant Professor of Writing & Literature, and of Graduate Writing at California College of the Arts. A poet and essayist, she is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna*, 2015), the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os (joca seria, 2016), and is a co-editor of Third Mind: Teaching Creative Writing through Visual Art (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2002).
She is currently a poetry editor at Fence Magazine, and a member of the poetry and fiction editing collective at The African-American Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Obsidian, Boundary2, Poetry Project Newsletter, the Harvard Review, Best American Experimental Writing, Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing, and elsewhere.
Foster is a recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Macdowell Artists Colony, the Headlands Center, and New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. She is currently working on A Mathematics of Chaos, a cross-genre collection that revolves around New Orleans, home, family, and displacement.
Alan Peláez López is an Afro-Indigenous poet, collage and adornment artist from the southern Pacific coast of Oaxaca, México. Their writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and “Best of the Net,” and appears/is forthcoming in Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press), POETRY Magazine, Puerto del Sol, Everyday Feminism & elsewhere. Their debut collection, Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien, is forthcoming from The Operating System Press (2020), and their chapbook, to love and mourn in the age of displacement, is forthcoming from Nomadic Press (September 2019).
More at www.alanpelaez.com and @migrantscribble.
Raina J. León is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, sombra: (dis)locate (2016) and the chapbook, profeta without refuge (2016). She has received fellowships and residencies with Macondo, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Montana Artists Refuge, the Macdowell Colony, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, among others.
She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts.
Aimee Suzara is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, and performer whose mission is to create poetic and theatrical work about race, gender, and the body to provoke dialogue and social change.
Her first full-length book, SOUVENIR, was released in February 2014 (WordTech Editions) and was a Willa Award Finalist in 2015. Her plays A HISTORY OF THE BODY and TINY FIRES were selected as Finalists for the Bay Area Playwright’s Festival. A HISTORY OF THE BODY was also commissioned by the East Bay Community Foundation and supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.
She has collaborated with Amara Tabor Smith and Deep Waters Dance Theater for the food-justice themed dance theater piece, Our Daily Bread. Her poems appear in numerous journals and anthologies such as Kartika Review, 580 Split, Lantern Review and Walang Hiya: Literature Taking Risks Toward Liberatory Practice, Check the Rhyme: An Anthology of Female Poets and Emcees and Poets (Lit Noire Press) and her chapbooks, the space between and Finding the Bones (Finishing Line Press).
She’s been featured as a spoken word artist nationally, including at Stanford, Mt. Holyoke College, Portland State University, University of Miami and UC Santa Cruz. Suzara received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Mills College. An advocate for the intersection of arts and literacy, she teaches at San Francisco State University and other universities and colleges, is the Spoken Arts Director at Ruth Azawa School of the Arts and leads workshops in poetry and performance for youth and adults.
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