Author: Barbara Jane Reyes, Rachelle Cruz, Jan-Henry Gray and Aldrin Valdez

An evening with Barbara Jane Reyes, Rachelle Cruz, Jan-Henry Gray, and Aldrin Valdez in honor of Filipino American History Month, and in celebration of Filipinx poetry and the release of Barbara Jane Reyes’s sixth book of poetry, Letters to a Young Brown Girl. Authors will read, hold dialogue and have short Q & A.

Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Letters to a Young Brown Girl (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2020). She was born in Manila, Philippines, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is the author of five previous collections of poetry, Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003), Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010), which received the Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry, To Love as Aswang (Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc., 2015) and Invocation to Daughters (City Lights Publishers, 2017).

She is an adjunct professor at University of San Francisco’s Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program. She lives with her husband, educator and poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland.

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Rachelle Cruz is the author of God's Will for Monsters (Inlandia, 2017), which won an American Book Award in 2018 and the 2016 Hillary Gravendyk Regional Poetry Prize.  She was appointed the 2018-2020 Inlandia Literary Laureate.  She co-edited Kuwento: Lost Things, an anthology of Philippine Myths (Carayan Press, 2015) with Melissa Sipin.  Her most recent book, Experiencing Comics: An Introduction to Reading, Discussing and Creating Comics, was published in Fall 2018. Her work has appeared in As/Us, Yellow Medicine Review, The Lit Pub,The Collagist, Bone Bouquet, PANK, Muzzle Magazine, Inlandia: A Literary Journey, among others. She hosts The Blood-Jet Writing Hour with Muriel Leung. She is a Lecturer in the Creative Writing Department at the University of California, Riverside.  An Emerging Voices Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow and a VONA writer, she lives and writes in Southern California.

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Jan-Henry Gray was born in the Philippines, grew up in California, and worked as a chef in San Francisco for more than 12 years. He lived undocumented in the US for more than 32 years. A graduate of San Francisco State University and Columbia College Chicago’s MFA program, he received the inaugural Undocupoets Fellowship and awards from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and the Academy of American Poets. Jan's writing can be found in Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color, The Rumpus, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Fourteen Hills, The Margins, Quarterly West, Puerto del Sol, and other journals. He is the author of the chapbook Selected Emails from speCt! Books. His first book, Documents, was chosen by D.A. Powell as the winner of BOA Editions’ 2018 Poulin Poetry Prize. He is a Kundiman fellow and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Adelphi University. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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Aldrin Valdez (they) is the author of ESL or You Weren't Here (Nightboat Books, 2018), selected as a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Poetry in 2019. They are a writer and visual artist.

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Reservation: https://bit.ly/BarbaraJaneReyes10-28-20