Summer Reading at the El Cerrito Library

Please join Baruch Porras-Hernandez and Maw Shein Win on Tuesday, July 17th at the El Cerrito Library.

We’ll begin with an open mic followed by readings & a short Q&A. Bring a poem to share and hope to see you there!

Food and bevs courtesy of the Friends of the El Cerrito Library.

Bios

Baruch Porras-Hernandez moved to El Cerrito his sophomore year of high school and lived here for 11 years till he moved to San Francisco. His mother still lives here, so he is normally in El Cerrito every weekend, walking to Fat Apples for their strong coffee and lemon meringue pie. He is a Pushcart Prize nominated writer, named one of the 13 Top Bay Area Writers to Watch in 2016 by 7×7 Magazine in San Francisco, and is a regular host and organizer of live literary shows for KQED. You can find his writing published online at The Tusk, his poems on Drunk in a Midnight Choir, Santa Ana River Review, and several other poetry anthologies like Assaracus, Foglifter, Red Light Lit, Quiet Lightning Rio Grande Review, Divining Divas, and two anthologies with Write Bloody Publishing. He was named a Lambda Literary Poetry Fellow in 2014, and a Lambda Literary Playwriting Fellow in 2016. He’s been featured in Writers with Drinks, has performed several times with Radar Productions, LitQuake, and Quiet Lightning. He is a winner of Literary Death Match, has won The Moth, Write Club SF, and was the reigning Muni Diaries Haiku Champion for 3 years. He is the head organizer of ¿Donde Esta Mi Gente? a Latinx literary performance series, created in part by the REGEN artist grant from the Galerìa de la Raza. He is an immigrant, originally from Mexico, and is currently the lead artist in a multidisciplinary project that will create new Queer Latino Superheroes with MACLA, which stands for Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana in San Jose.

Maw Shein Win is a Burmese American poet and educator who lives and works in the Bay Area. Her writing has appeared in many journals and several anthologies, including MARY: A Journal of New Writing, Cimarron Review, Poetry International, Fanzine, The Fabulist, and others. She often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers. Along with composer and musician, Amanda Chaudhary, she is part of musical duo Pitta of the Mind that combines poetry with abstract electronic music. A collaborative book with paintings by artist Mark Dutcher, Ruins of a glittering palace, was published by SPA/Commonwealth Projects. Her poetry chapbook Score and Bone is on Nomadic Press, and her full-length collection Invisible Gifts: Poems was recently published by Manic D Press. She is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito.