Bearing the Mask Book Launch & Reading

When:
November 19, 2016 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm
2016-11-19T19:00:00-06:00
2016-11-19T20:00:00-06:00
Cost:
Free

Join us for a reading to celebrate the launch of Dos Gatos Press’ most recent anthology, Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems, edited by Scott Wiggerman and Cindy Huyser with a foreword by Dr. Carmen Tafolla. With readings from Anjela Ratliff, C. Samuel Rees, Charlotte Renk, Christa Pandey, Cindy Huyser, Cyra Dumitru, Gloria Amescua, Gordon Magill, Katherine Oldmixon, Leticia Urieta, Lucy Griffith, Lyman Grant, Lynn Reynolds, Sandi Stromberg, Vanessa Zimmer-Powell, Barbara Randals Gregg, and Scott Wiggerman.

This reading will feature poets from Austin and across the state reading their own work and others’ from this acclaimed anthology. The second in a series of anthologies of poetry of the Southwest by Albuquerque-based Dos Gatos Press, Bearing the Mask presents a diverse collection of personae from before European contact to the present, from the historical to the mythical, and from the famous to the obscure, woven together to form a vibrant, complex history.

Bearing The MaskAbout Bearing the Mask:

To quote from the foreword by Texas Poet Laureate Carmen Tafolla, “The range of voices here is as beautiful and translucent as a rainbow. From Cochise to Calamity Jane, Navaho Code Talkers to Japanese internees, Devil Girl and Old Man Gloom, slaves and stunt pilots, Paiutes and migrant mothers, Annie Oakley and Georgia O’Keeffe, security officers and French tourists, Gregorio Cortez, La Llorona, and Cynthia Ann Parker—all come to life here, speak their own truths and their own sacred space in these poems.”

Bearing the Mask offers rich perspectives on life in the Southwest, garnering praise in reader reviews that call it “fascinating” and “an amazing book for poetry and history lovers.”

Bearing The Mask readers 01

Photo, L-R: Anjela Ratliff, C. Samuel Rees, Charlotte Renk, Christa Pandey, Cindy Huyser

Anjela Villarreal Ratliff’s poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals, including Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku & Haiga; The Enigmatist; Blue Hole; Texas Poetry Calendar; di-vêrsé-city; Australian Latino Press; Boundless 2016; Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems; Ribbons Anthology; and forthcoming in Chachalaca Review; Pilgrimage Magazine; and The Crafty Poet II: A Portable Workshop. Anjela is also a writing workshop presenter for youth and adults. A native Tejana, she was raised in southern California, but has resided in Austin since 1990.

C. Samuel Rees is an alumnus of Loyola University of Maryland’s writing program. He has been published in Fairy Tale Review, JMWW, Pithead Chapel, Permafrost, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and in the Texas Poetry Calendar. He lives in Austin, Texas where he writes poetry, fiction, and works as a high school teacher.

Charlotte Renk‘s poetry has appeared in journals such as Kalliope, Concho River Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Southwest Review, and Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, as well as in anthologies such as The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VIII: Texas, and Her Texas. She has also published three books of poetry— These Holy Hungers: Secret Yearnings from an Empty Cup, Solidago: An Altar to Weeds, and The Tenderest Petal Hears (co-winner, 2014 Blue Horse Press Chapbook Award).

Christa Pandey has been widely published since she moved to Austin. As German immigrant herself she became interested in the immigration saga of the 19th century. Her poems are collected in three chapbooks (Southern Seasons, Maya, and Hummingbird Wings), while individual poems can be found in the Texas Poetry Calendar, the Poetry@Round Top Anthology, Naugatuck River Review and online at Silver Birch Press.

Cindy Huyser has worked with Dos Gatos Press as an editor since 2008. Her chapbook, Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems, was named co-winner of the 2014 Blue Horse Press Poetry Chapbook contest. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Comstock Review, San Pedro River Review, The Nassau Review, Untameable City, and the Texas Poetry Calendar, which she co-edited from 2009 – 2014.

Bearing The Mask readers 02

Photo, L-R: Cyra Dumitru, Gloria Amescua, Gordon Magill, Katherine Oldmixon, Leticia Urieta

Cyra S. Dumitru is a teacher of poetry writing, writing as healing and of college composition, and is certified in Poetic Medicine through The Institute of Poetic Medicine. She facilitates individual and small group healing through writing circles in a variety of community settings. She has three book-length collections of her poems: What the Body Knows, Listening to Light, and remains.

Gloria Amescua, a CantoMundo fellow and Hedgebrook alumna, is the author of two chapbooks, Windchimes and What Remains. Amescua has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, including di-verse-city, Kweli Journal, the Texas Poetry Calendar, The Acentos Review, Toe Good Poetry, Pilgrimage Magazine, and Elsewhere Lit. She has also received the Austin Poetry Society Award and the Christina Sergeyenvna Award.

Gordon Magill is a journalist, writing teacher, exhibit writer, freelancer, and poet. He has worked at The Washington Evening Star and Washington Post in Washington DC, taught writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM, as well as in public high school, and has written about two hundred published articles and short stories. Recently Gordon’s poetry has been published in The Enigmatist and Blue Hole.

Katherine Durham Oldmixon’s recent poems appear in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, Improbable Worlds: An Anthology of Texas and Louisiana Poets, Lifting the Sky, Texas Poetry Calendar, and in her chapbook Water Signs. Katherine co-directs the Poetry at Round Top festival, is a senior poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly, and professor and chair of English at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, TX.

Leticia Urieta is a Tejana writer from Austin, TX. She is a graduate of Agnes Scott College and a fiction candidate in the MFA program at Texas State University, where she is a graduate teaching assistant and the blog editor for Front Porch Journal. She is currently working as an educator in the community with a focus on equity in the pedagogy of writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cleaver, Chicon Street Poets, St. Sucia Zine and BorderSenses. Leticia lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and two dogs. She is currently at work on a short story collection and her first novel about the role of Mexican soldaderas in Texas’ war with Mexico.

Bearing The Mask readers 03

Photo, L-R: Lucy Griffith, Lyman Grant, Lynn Reynolds, Sandi Stromberg, Vanessa Zimmer-Powell

Lucy Griffith is a poet and essayist who lives on a ranch along the Guadalupe River near Comfort, Texas. She is a Certified Master Naturalist as well as a licensed psychologist.
She is a member of the Texas Writer’s League and has been published monthly in The Texas Star and various psychology journals. Her muse is a tractor named Ruby and a good day is one spent outside.

Lyman Grant teaches creative writing, English, and humanities at Austin Community College. He is married and the proud father of three sons. A poet since high school, he has a big pile of poems, some of them collected in four books and one chapbook. The most recent is Last Work: A Meditation on the Final Paintings of Neal Adams.

Lynn Reynolds wrote many poems while a member of the Houston Poetry Society, the Texas Poetry Society and Poets, Ink. She read at the 2012 Houston Poetry Fest and has now been published in From Hide and Horn: A Sesquicentennial Anthology of Texas Poets, the Texas Poetry Calendar, and Untameable City.

Sandi Stromberg was guest editor of Mutabilis Press’ latest poetry anthology, Untameable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appeared in the Texas Poetry Calendar, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Red River Review, Illya’s Honey, and Colere, among others, as well as in the anthologies TimeSlice, The Weight of Addition, and Improbable Worlds, Crossing Lines, Goodbye, Mexico, Civilized Beasts, and is upcoming in Texas Weather Anthology. She has been a juried poet in the Houston Poetry Fest eight times.

Vanessa Zimmer-Powell was the winner of a Rick Steves Haiku Award, and was a poetry award winner at the 2013 Austin International Poetry Fest. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Weekly Avocet, Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poems, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Ekphrasis, Untameable City, the Texas Poetry Calendar, San Pedro River Review, The Chaffey Review, and Copperfield Review.

Barbara and Scott

Photo, L-R: Barbara Randals Gregg, Scott Wiggerman

Barbara Randals Gregg has poetry in di-verse-city, The Enigmatist, Blue Hole, the Austin Poetry Society’s Best Austin Poetry anthology, Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry, Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku and Haiga, and several editions of Texas Poetry Calendar. She currently serves as Austin Poetry Society President.

Scott Wiggerman is the author of three books of poetry, Leaf and Beak: Sonnets, Presence, and Vegetables and Other Relationships; and an editor of several volumes, including Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, Lifting the Sky, Wingbeats II, and Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems. Recent poems have appeared in Naugatuck River Review, Red Earth Review, Pinyon Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and the anthologies This Assignment Is So Gay, Forgetting Home: Poems about Alzheimer’s, and The Great Gatsby Anthology. He is an editor for Dos Gatos Press of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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