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Reading Ethnic Studies
a literary presentation of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction

Friday
April 29
7 p.m.
$5

Event Description:

Participants will read original work that responds to the dialogue around Arizona’s ethnic studies legislation. The readers include Tucson teachers and high school students, a recent winner of the Bellwether prize in fiction, an NEA Literature fellow, a slam poet, and a Cave Canem fellow. A question/answer period will follow the reading. The reading is to raise awareness for Save Ethnic Studies.

The event is organized by Arizona Writers for Justice (AWJ) to address the political rhetoric surrounding HB2281 . “In the midst of all the rhetoric, the stories of how we’re living and understanding our realities often get lost,” says Rae Paris, co-founder of AWJ. “We hope to bring some of these stories to the surface.”

About Arizona Writers for Justice
Arizona Writers for Justice serves as a network and resource for writers of color in Arizona working toward social justice. The organization includes poets, slam poets, fiction writers, visual artists, educators and others. Building on and honoring the traditions of those who have come before, the organization is committed to creating a just, peaceful, and loving place to live and work. For more information please visit AWJ on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Arizona-Writers-for-Justice-AWJ/103653299710073

Participants in “Reading Ethnic Studies” will include (bios below):

Naomi Benaron’s novel, Running the Rift, was selected by Barbara Kingsolver as the winner of the 2010 Bellwether Prize for socially engaged fiction. It is forthcoming from Algonquin. Her other prizes and awards include the Sharat Chandra Prize for Fiction, the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, and the Lorian Hemingway short story competition. She teaches writing online for UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and through the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, a project to mentor Afghan women writers living in Afghanistan and abroad.

 

 

 

Myrlin Hepworth was born and raised in Lewiston, Idaho. After graduation from high school, Hepworth made his way to Arizona where he found work, college, and the Arizona Slam Scene. He was the youngest poet to be invited to perform and teach a workshop at both the Northern Arizona Youth Poetry Festival, in Flagstaff, and Poetry Central in Phoenix. In 2009, he read with poet Jimmy Santiago Baca at the Coconino Center for the Arts. On the national scene he has performed at major venues in Seattle, Dallas, Austin, Albuquerque, and elsewhere.


Django Paris is assistant professor of English at Arizona State University. He received his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. Before entering graduate school, He spent six years as an English language arts teacher in Berkeley, California, Tucson, Arizona, and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Paris is also the associate director of the Bread Loaf School of English, a summer graduate program of Middlebury College. His forthcoming book, Language across Difference, is an ethnography exploring the ways the oral and written language of youth of color challenges and reinforces notions of ethnic difference and division in multiethnic high schools.He is the recipient of fellowships from the Spencer Foundation and the Ford Foundation. He will be reading from an vignette-based essay entitled, “Become History: Learning from Identity Texts and Youth Activism in the  Wake of Arizona SB 1070”

Rae Paris is a fiction writer from Carson, California. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in 2010. The title story of her collection, The Girl Who Ate Her Own Skin, was a recommended story in the 2009 O. Henry Prize Stories. The collection was a finalist for the 2008 Flannery O'Connor Award in Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared in Indian Review, Hunger Mountain, 580 Split and other journals. She is the recipient of writing residencies from Hedgebrook, Norcroft, and VONA. She will be reading from her novella "Love Lies Bleeding" which focuses on a young woman of color in a high school that seriously needs some ethnic studies. 

 

Renee Simms, winner of the 2003 Inkwell Grand Prize in Poetry, selected by Elizabeth Alexander, has had poetry and fiction in numerous journals and anthologies, including North American Review, Hawai'i Review, Oregon Literary Review, Inkwell Journal and "Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature" (Wiley & Sons 2000). She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, PEN's Emerging Voices Program and the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation.

 

 

Aisha Sabatini Sloan is a Los Angeles native. She earned an MA in Cultural Studies and Studio Art from NYU's Gallatin School for Individualized Study, and and MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona. Her writing has appeared in various journals such as identitytheory.com, terrain.org, Callaloo and the Michigan Quarterly Review, and will be featured in an upcoming issue of Ninth Letter. She currently teaches writing at the University of Arizona.

 

Readers also include Yolanda Sotelo, Monica Velderrain, Daniel Davenport, and Jazmine Nogales.


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