Palabra Pura: Who Stands With Us

According to this month’s curator, Emilio Maldonado, challenging each other and the status quo is the responsibility of the committed artist, and he has programmed author/activists Aricka Foreman, Christina Obregon, and Raina Wodatch, and to engage the theme Who stands with us?

“During this current wave of open aggression and hostility it is important to find who our allies really are,” Maldonado says. “Where we learn who stands with us can be as important as who stands against us. Far too often we act against our own interests because we allow division to creep in. Liking a post on Facebook just isn’t near enough. The featured readers are strong voices who are committed artists.”

All “mother” tongues are welcome! Arrive early to sign up for the open mic.

Palabra Pura is pay-what-you-can ($5 suggested donation). Audience contributions support honorariums for the curators and featured authors.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Aricka Foreman’s work has appeared in The Drunken Boat, Torch Poetry: A Journal for African American Women, Minnesota Review, Union Station Magazine, Vinyl Poetry, and Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the NextGeneration by Viking Penguin.  A Cave Canem and Callaloo Writer’s Workshop Fellow, she is the Enumerate Editor for The Offing.

Christina Obregon, a second generation Xicana, was born and raised on the southwest side of Chicago. Since her late teens she has been politically and culturally involved in a series of human rights campaigns including ending violence and the exploitation of women and children. Christina has also been actively involved with La Casa de Arte y Cultural- Calles y Sueños, a self sustaining autonomous cultural center in the heart of the Pilsen Neighborhood in Chicago. She has been guided and strongly influenced by Jose David, founder of Calles y Sueños, and continues to dedicate her time to the development of the project. She is also the coordinator of Calles y Sueños.

Inspired by Chicago’s spoken word and slam poetry community, Raina Wodatch left her ten-year career in teaching high school English to continue her education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she is working on her MFA in Writing. Though her focus is on poetry, SAIC’s interdisciplinary program has prompted her to begin a practice in studio arts, influenced by studies in Concrete Poetry and Surrealism. Tending to her initial interests in spoken word, Raina has frequented open mics throughout Chicago, including: The Gala, Urban Sandbox, Weeds, K(NO)W ARMY and West Side School for the Desperate, Mental Graffiti, and The Green Mill.

ABOUT OUR CURATOR

Emilio Maldonado is a poet and performer born and raised in Chicago’s concrete jungle, where streets bury streets. He knows layers, has the city’s voices in his bones. As a world traveler with familial roots in Mexico, he writes for the world, the everyman, with poems also layered in the collisions of culture, and the music, and the late night streets of anywhere alone.