6:00 - 7:30
United States
A reading and conversation on the shared aesthetics of innovative hybrid literature, and in celebration of the release of Because I love you, I become war by Eileen R. Tabios and nature felt but never apprehended by Angela Peñaredondo. The event will also feature Hari Alluri, MT Vallarta and Barbara Jane Reyes. Sponsored by the San Francisco Public Library, Paloma Press, and Philippine American Writers and Artists.
Eileen R. Tabios has released over 70 books of poetry, fiction, and prose from publishers around the world. This event launches her poetry collection, Because I love you, I become war, which was ranked No. 1 in Amazon's New Releases in Asian Poetry and which sold out at its distributor SPD before its official release date next month (restocking is underway). Later this year, she will release two more books: The Inventor: A Transcolonial Poet's Autobiography and Getting to One, her first collection of flash fictions.
Book Synopsis:
Because I love you, I become war is Eileen R. Tabios’ love poem to a world in turmoil. She dedicates it to “those who are fighting against the planet’s current great ailments: environmental damage and economic/political oligarchism.” Poems address
war, environmental havoc, women and their concerns throughout history, poetics, political science, immigration and diaspora, oligarchism, dictatorships, and the limits of language, among others. The prose, culled from the past two decades, presents essays, speeches, reviews, and letters that address the author’s poetic concerns as well as a daily writing prompt, expanding the form of the novel, Methodism, homages to literary figures, and the author’s “First Book.” Its treasures include an adobo poem as never before conceptualized, as well as a letter of recommendation for a visual artist for the year 2021 when the Philippines refused to designate a National Artist for Visual Arts. The book ends with a postscript of poems on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As a whole, the book (re)presents a polymathic perspective on how love faces injustice, as contextualized by the Filipino indigenous trait of “kapwa” which posits that everything is interconnected.
Angela Peñaredondo is a queer Filipinx writer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. They are the author of nature felt but never apprehended (Noemi Press), All Things Lose Thousands of Times (Inlandia Institute, Winner of Hillary Gravendyk Regional Prize) and Maroon (Jamii Publications). Peñaredondo’s work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets, Pleiades Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. They are an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at California State University San Bernardino. They live in Los Angeles with their partner and many cramped plants in stolen, occupied lands of the Tongva and Kivh nations.
Book Synopsis:
nature felt but never apprehended synthesizes lyrical prose, fragmented creative_edited.jpg)
nonfiction, and imagery. It voyages the crossings of gender and environmental
injustices, histories of Philippines colonialism and intimacies of survivorhood.
Peñaredondo wields queer, diasporic divination and ritual as an illuminating force in the
tangles of intergenerational memory.
Hari Alluri (he/him/siya) is a migrant poet of Filipinx and South Asian descent. He is author of The Flayed City, Carving Ashes, and chapbook The Promise of Rust. Writer-director of “Pasalubong: Gifts from the Journey”, co-editor of We Were Not Alone and co-founding editor at Locked Horn Press, siya has received grants, fellowships, and residencies from the BC Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, The Capilano Review, Deer Lake, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, VONA/Voices, and others.
MT Vallarta is a poet and the 2022-2023 Guarini Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American Studies at Dartmouth College. A Kundiman Fellow, Roots. Wounds. Words. Fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee, their forthcoming poetry collection, What You Refuse to Remember, won Small Harbor Publishing’s 2022 Laureate Prize. They received their Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Riverside.
Barbara Jan
e Reyes is a longtime Bay Area poet, author, and educator. She is the author of Wanna Peek Into My Notebook? Notes on Pinay Liminality, Letters to a Young Brown Girl, Invocation to Daughters, To Love as Aswang, Diwata, Poeta en San Francisco, and Gravities of Center. She teaches Pinay Literature, and Diasporic Filipina/o/x Literature in the Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program at the University of San Francisco.
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