Celebrated poet Linda Ravenswood presents Cantadora – Letters from California, a collection of 44 hybrid texts which read as maps, diary entries, manifestos, dream fragments, and lists.

Her branching perspective of the 500+ years span of the (so-called) Conquest of Mexico by Cortés and the Spanish army (1521-present) explores reverberations across landscapes & cultures of the American West that are still being navigated. The voices explore past, present, & future histories of those who dwell in the West. Some histories explored include WWII Holocaust survivors of Los Angeles, relocated NDN children of the 19th century, Chontales people of the Yucatán encountering ships of Cortés, border blurring, intersectional feminism, and 21st-century balancing acts of Latinidad. This extraordinary collection is a tour de force of poetic craft, colonial sensitivity, intellect, and conscience. In celebration of Cantadora – Letters From California, Linda Ravenswood alongside Chicano poet Matt Sedillo, author Jennifer Lewis, & L.A. Poet Laureate Lynne Thompson will join us for an evening of poetry readings in-person at Beyond Baroque.

Celebrate the publication of Cantadora: -Letters from California (The Black Spring Press Group) with an evening of readings from authors based in Southern California. Linda will be joined by Jennifer Lewis, Caribbean Fragoza, Matt Sedillo, & L.A. Poet Laureate Lynne Thompson.

Doors open: 6:30 PM

About the authors

Linda Ravenswood is a mixed Indigenous, Mestiza, European & Jewish scholar & performance artist from California. Recent publications include XLA Poets (Hinchas Press, 2021) & The Stan Poems (Pedestrian Press, 2022). She is the founder & editor-in-chief at The Los Angeles Press. Find her at thelosangelespress.com.

Jennifer Lewis is a writer, editor, and the publisher of Red Light Lit. Her debut short story collection, The New Low, was released in October 2022 by Nomadic Press, where her short story, “New Low,” was the winner of the Bindle Award in 2018. In 2020, she won the Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction award for “Put a Teat in It.” She received her MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University in May 2015. She teaches at The Writing Salon in San Francisco.

Carribean Fragoza is a fiction writer and journalist from South El Monte, CA. Her collection of stories Eat the Mouth That Feeds You was published in 2021 by City Lights and was a finalist for a 2022 PEN Award. Her co-edited compilation of essays, East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte was published by Rutgers University Press and her forthcoming collection of essays Writing Home: New Terrains of California will be published by Angel City Press in 2023. She has published in Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times, Zyzzyva, Alta, BOMB, Huizache, KCET, the Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtNews, and Aperture Magazine. She is the Prose Editor at Huizache Magazine and Creative Nonfiction and Poetry Editor at Boom California, a journal of UC Press. Fragoza is the founder and co-director of South El Monte Arts Posse, an interdisciplinary arts collective. She lives in the San Gabriel Valley in Greater Los Angeles.

Lynne Thompson is Los Angeles’ 2021-22 Poet Laureate and a 2022 Poet Laureate Fellow of the Academy of American Poets. Thompson is the author of three collections of poetry: Beg No Pardon, Start With A Small Guitar, and most recently Fretwork, winner of the 2019 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize. The recipient of multiple awards and fellowships including several Pushcart Prize nominations, Thompson sits on the Boards of Cave Canem and the Los Angeles Review of Books and recently completed her term as Chair of the Board of Trustees at Scripps College. Her recent work can be found or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry, New England Review, Black Warrior Review, Massachusetts Review, The Common, and Copper Nickel, among others.

Matt Sedillo has been described as the “best political poet in America” as well as “the poet laureate of the struggle” by academics, poets, and journalists alike. He has appeared on CSPAN and has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. He has spoken at Casa de las Americas in Havana, Cuba, at numerous conferences and forums such as the National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in American Higher Education, National Association of Chicana/Chicano Studies, The Left Forum, The US Social Forum, and at over a hundred universities and colleges, including the University of Cambridge, among many others. He is the current literary director of the Mexican Cultural Institute of Los Angeles and author of Mowing Leaves of Grass (FlowerSong Press, 2019) and City on the Second Floor (FlowerSong Press, 2022).

This event is Free & In-Person at Beyond Baroque. Masks are required while inside our center.

Beyond Baroque reserves the right to remove individuals from our events, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, fellow attendees, or performers.

If you can’t join us in person the event will be streamed live on Beyond Baroque’s YouTube channel at the scheduled time of the event.

Please RSVP if you are planning to attend this event. We accept walk-ins, but priority will be given to people that have registered. Limited seating is available; we recommend arriving early.