2023-24 Events

Alan Pelaez Lopez is an afroindigenous (Zapotec) poet, installation, and adornment artist from Oaxaca, México. Their work attends to the quotidian realities of undocumented migrants in the United States, Black resistance in the Pacific, and the intimate kinship units that trans* and nonbinary people build in the face of violence. They dream of a future where nationalism ends and where Indigenous sovereignty is respected, which includes the mess and contradiction of it all. Pelaez Lopez is the author of Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020), a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award, to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020), and the editor of When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent (University of Arizona Press, 2023).

Desiree C. Bailey is a poet and writer from Trinidad and Tobago, and Queens, NY. She is the author of What Noise Against the Cane (Yale University Press) which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize. What Noise Against the Cane was also longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and was selected as one of the Best Books of 2021 by the New York Public Library. Desiree is also the author of the short fiction chapbook In Dirt or Saltwater (O’Clock Press). She is currently the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Clemson University and will be an Assistant Professor at the MFA for Poets and Writers at UMass Amherst, starting in Fall 2024.