(Wed) April 17, 2024, 6:00pm — 7:00pm
Join us for the 2nd Willow Poetry Reading Series event at Clovis Community College! This event will feature a reading and discussion with award-winning poets and acclaimed writers Brynn Saito, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Janice Lobo Sapigao. The event is FREE, open to the public, and will take place in the AC1-150 Lecture Hall on the Main Campus. A reception with light refreshments will follow the poetry reading.
This event is sponsored by the English & Library Department; Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Workgroup; and 2023-2024 Action Plan funds from the CCC Department Chairs.
For more information, or if you have any questions, contact: Professor Von Torres or Professor Melanie Sanwo
Photo Credit: Dave Lehl
Brynn Saito (she/her), MA, MFA, is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Under a Future Sky (Red Hen Press, 2023). A 2023 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow, Brynn is the winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award and a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Brynn also co-authored with Traci Brimhall the poetry chapbook, Bright Power, Dark Peace (Diode Editions, 2016). She teaches in the Creative Writing program at California State University, Fresno, located on the traditional lands of the Yokuts and Mono peoples. Brynn is coediting with Brandon Shimoda an anthology of poetry written by descendants of the Japanese American/Nikkei incarceration, forthcoming in 2025 from Haymarket Books.
Juan Felipe Herrera is the 21st Poet Laureate of the United States (2015-2016) and is the first Latino to hold the position. From 2012-2014, Herrera served as California State Poet Laureate. Herrera’s many collections of poetry include California Brown: Illuminations & Hollers; Every Day We Get More Illegal; Notes on the Assemblage; Senegal Taxi; Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems, a recipient of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border: Undocuments 1971-2007. He is also the author of Crashboomlove: A Novel in Verse, which received the Americas Award. His books of prose for children include: I Am the Future; SkateFate, Calling The Doves, which won the Ezra Jack Keats Award; Upside Down Boy, which was adapted into a musical for young audiences in New York City; and Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box. His book Jabberwalking, a children’s book focused on turning your wonder at the world around you into weird, wild, incandescent poetry, came out in 2018. Herrera is also a performance artist and activist on behalf of migrant and indigenous communities and at-risk youth.
Janice Lobo Sapigao is a Filipina American writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of the poetry collections like a solid to a shadow (Nightboat Books, 2022) and microchips for millions (PAWA, Inc., 2016), along with two other chapbooks. She is a 2023-2026 Lucas Arts Resident in Literary Arts at the Montalvo Arts Center. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Newberry Library in Chicago, IL, an AWP Writer-to-Writer Mentee in fiction, the 2020-2021 Santa Clara County Poet Laureate, and a Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets. She is an Associate Professor of English at Skyline College where she received the Meyer Excellence in Teaching Award in 2023. She co-founded Santa Clara County’s Youth Poet Laureate Program as a chapter with Urban Word NYC, and she co-founded Sunday Jump Open Mic in Los Angeles’s Historic Filipinotown. She is working on a novel.
