Palabra Pura: “Telling Our Stories Through the Body”

Join us this April for “Telling Our Stories Through the Body,” curated by Erika Sánchez and featuring Juana Iris Goergen and Ruben Quesada. More details below.

Erika L. Sánchez is a poet and freelance writer living in Chicago. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Illinois at Chicago, was a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to Madrid, Spain, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico. She is currently the sex and love advice columnist for Cosmopolitan for Latinas and a contributor for The Huffington Post, NBC Latino, and others. Her poetry has appeared in Pleiades, Drunken Boat, Witness, Anti-, Hunger Mountain, Crab Orchard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Copper Nickel, and others. She has written book reviews for Kirkus Reviews and her nonfiction has been published in Jezebel, AlterNet, and Ms. Magazine.

Juana Iris Goergen (Puerto Rico). Published poet. Professor of Spanish,  Latin American and U.S. Latino Literature at DePaul University, Chicago. As a poet she has published La sal de las brujas (finalist at Letras de Oro and published by Betania 1997) and  La piel a medias (2001),  Las Ilusas/Dreamers (Vocesueltas, 2008) as well as poems published in anthologies: Astillas de luz/Shards of Light (1998), Nosotros los otros (1996) Between the Heart and the Land/Entre el corazón y la tierra (2001), Generación (2001). She is the editor of Susurros para disipar las sombras: Antología poética,  V International Poetry Festival Poesía en Abril, Michigan: Erato Ediciones, 2012. She developed and co-organizes in Chicago, Poesía en abril, International Poetry Festival in Spanish, now in its 6^th year. She has two unpublished poetry collections: La celda de Lilith and ContraOda al sueño americano.

Ruben Quesada is the author of Next Extinct Mammal (2011) and Luis Cernuda: Exiled from the Throne of Night (2008). A CantoMundo fellow, he is the Founding Editor of Codex Journal, and Poetry Editor at The Cossack Review. His writing has appeared in Cimarron Review, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, Rattle, and Third Coast. He teaches creative writing at Eastern Illinois University.