Living Writers Series Spring 2025

Living Writers Spring 2025: Insights, Writings: Third World and Other Imaginaries.

The Living Writers Series and the Center for Racial Justice present poets, theorists, and hybrid artists working at the nexus of writing and arts practices by way of aesthetic play, cultural organizing, unearthing memory, telling stories, and re-inventing real and imagined correspondences in art, poetry, memoir, fiction, creative nonfiction, performance, and politics. Each animates our third world as a contemporary and fluid space for struggle, tension, and justice in language across rich modes of resistance as artistic and lived imaginaries. 

Thursdays, 5:20 to 6:55 PM  Humanities 1 Lecture Hall 206. This event is free and open to the public. No RSVP necessary. 

Spring 2025 Schedule

April 10: julie ezelle patton 

Poet, visual artist, Julie Ezelle-Patton’s most recent title is The Flower Poem (Tender Buttons, 2024). J Walking thru the Alphabet, an edited selection of Patton’s concrete, visual, and textual poetics from the 1970s to the near present, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books, Fall, 2025. The recently released Chicago Review (Vol. 67), ARKiTEXT,  focuses on Let It Bee, her “poetic conceit” of transforming a 1913 Rustbelt brownstone into a living archive of work created by Depression-era artists Russell Atkins, Clifton Clay, Virgie Patton, Theresa Ramey and others, whom Patton has advocated for and collected since the mid-aughts, is a unique collaboration featuring housing, assemblages and installations of locally resourced detritus, For the Birds, an edible forest for wildlife, a coal room theater, writing and meditation spaces, herb gardens and a Cat Cafe. Patton’s “in-the-moment” sound and performance work bridging musical and literary collaborations with artists as diverse as instrumentalists Nasheet Waits, Ken Filiano, Melanie Dyer, Janice Lowe, Jay Rodriguez, and others, has captivated audiences at the Stone, Torn Page, Jazz Standard, Arts for Arts, Festival Internacional de Poesía in Medellín, Colombia, and at a host of international venues. A recipient of an Acker Award, Denniston Hill Residency, a Doan Brook Watershed Hero Award, and a Foundation for Contemporary Art Poetry Award, Patton currently divides her time between New York City & the rest of the US. Her noted Womb Room Tomb Installation was featured in the 2018 Front International Triennial to great acclaim.

May 8: Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa's most recent work is The Politics of Sorrow (Columbia University Press). Other works include the chapbook Revolute (Albion Books, 2021) three collections of poetry: My Rice Tastes Like the Lake, In the Absent Everyday and Rules of the House (all from Apogee Press, Berkeley).  Dhompa's first non-fiction book, A Home to Tibet was published by Penguin India. Dhompa is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Villanova University.

May 15: Maria Elena Ramirez

Maria E. Ramirez is a woman of Chicana, Puerto Rican, and Apache ancestry. She was actively involved in the student movement in the late sixties, where students, along with their parents, marched and demanded that their community be part of all the higher education systems, which at the time were overwhelmingly white. She became deeply involved with the Los Siete organization in San Francisco due to the awareness she gained in the Vacaville prison project at UCB. She left UCB to devote herself full-time to be in solidarity with all the diverse communities in San Francisco. In 1972, she became one of the first Chicanas to visit the People's Republic of China through the Chinese Friendship Association. Eventually, returning to her home in Union City, still guided by social and Earth Justice movements, she went on to get her master's and has now served as a community college counselor for over 25 years and developed her own one-woman storytelling show, Chicana Herstory. She continues to be involved in her community against gentrification and environmental pollution and is co-founder of Families United for Equity, which advocates for the developmental disabled community.

May 22: Angel Dominguez 

Angel Dominguez is a Latiné poet of Yucatec Maya descent born in Hollywood and raised in Van Nuys, CA, by their immigrant family. They now live amongst the redwoods of Bonny Doon, CA. They’re the author of several books of poetry and prose, including Desgraciado (Nightboat Books, 2022) and, most recently, the 10-year anniversary edition of their debut work, Black Lavender Milk (Noemi Press, 2024). They were the 2023 Poet in Residence at the University of Arizona's Poetry Center in Tucson and the 2021 Mazza writer in residence for San Francisco State University. They currently serve as managing editor for Lilac Press. You can find Angel’s work online and in print in various publications, including BOMB Magazine, The Berkeley Poetry Review, FENCE, SFMOMA Open Space, and elsewhere. You can find Angel in the redwoods or ocean.