Bazaar Writers Salon

Readings by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Kara Krewer, Kim Magowan, and Brynn Saito
Hosted by Peter Kline

Poet, essayist, translator, and immigration advocate Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, and emigrated from Tepechitlan with his family at age five to the California Central Valley. He earned a BA at Sacramento State University and is the first undocumented student to earn an MFA at the University of Michigan. He is the author of the chapbook DULCE, winner of the 2017 Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize. His debut full-length collection is Cenzontle (BOA Editions, 2018), which was chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy as the winner of the 2017 A. Poulin, Jr. prize.

Kara Krewer was raised on an orchard in rural Georgia. She likes skee-ball, horror movies, and museums. She has a BA from Knox College and an MFA from Purdue University, where she was editor-in-chief of Sycamore Review, and has been a faculty member of Interlochen Arts Camp. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming from The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets 2017, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She’s currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She lives in Santa Clara, California, with her husband and their cat.

Kim Magowan’s short story collection Undoing won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her novel The Light Source is forthcoming from 7.13 Books. Her fiction has been published in Atticus Review, Bird’s Thumb, Cleaver, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, New World Writing, Sixfold, and many other journals. She lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College.

Brynn Saito is the author of two books of poetry, Power Made Us Swoon (2016) and The Palace of Contemplating Departure (2013), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award from Red Hen Press and a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. She also co-authored, with Traci Brimhall, the chapbook Bright Power, Dark Peace (Diode Editions, 2016). Brynn is a recipient of the Kundiman Poetry Fellowship and a California State Library Civil Liberties Public Education grant. Originally from Fresno, Brynn lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she is the Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College of California and co-directs, with Nikiko Masumoto, the Yonsei Memory Project.