Canessa Gallery Reading Series presents Achiote Press’s Spring Release Reading featuring:

Oscar Bermeo
Barbara Jane Reyes
Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor
Todd Melicker
& Alfred Arteaga

APRIL 29!!!
708 montgomery (x street Columbus) at the Canessa Park Gallery at 3PM. $3-5 donation for the gallery. In gratitude for your donation, our chapbooks will be sold at DISCOUNT PRICES!!!! Refreshments also!!!

READER BIOS:

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Born in Ecuador and raised in the Bronx, Oscar Bermeo is a BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) award winning poet, educator, literary events coordinator who now makes his home in Oakland, Califas, where he is the poetry editor for Tea Party Magazine. When not writing, Oscar devotes his time and energy towards new culinary experiments, working admin at a local charter school and enjoying the bliss of married life with his wife, poeta Barbara Jane Reyes.

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Todd Melicker is a graduate of the MFA in Writing program at the University of San Francsico. His poems have appeared in Switchback, Five Fingers Review, Volt, and the Colorado Review. He currently lives in Santa Rosa, California.

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Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her undergraduate education at UC Berkeley, and her MFA at San Francisco State University. She is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish, 2005), for which she received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets.

Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including 2nd Avenue Poetry, Asian Pacific American Journal, Chain, Interlope, New American Writing, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Parthenon West Review, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Mills College, and she lives with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland, CA.

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Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor received her MA degree in English with honors from Western Washington University in 2003 for her thesis “Notes from the Margins,” a mixed work of memoir and fiction. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in the Katipunan Literary Magazine and the online magazine Haruah. In addition, she has served as a freelance writer and editor for several trade journals. Currently she is working on her first novel, tentatively titled Maganda’s Comb, and she performs regularly as a storyteller in her local area. Her blog Binding Wor(l)ds Together can be found at http://wordbinder.blogspot.com.

Evie Shockley & Barbara Jane Reyes: 4/15/07 @ Pegasus Books

Evie Shockley & Barbara Jane Reyes
Sunday, April 15th, 7:30 pm
Pegasus Books Dowtown
2349 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley
(510) 649-1320

Evie Shockley published a chapbook of poems, The Gorgon Goddess, with Carolina Wren Press in 2001. Her new collection, a half-red sea, will be released in Fall, 2006. Her poetry has appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Callaloo, Hambone, HOW2 and Poetry Daily: Poems from the World’s Most Popular Poetry Website. She has also placed her prose-fiction and literary criticism-in such publications as Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, African American Review, North American Review, and Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry. Shockley is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ.

Barbara Jane Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her undergraduate education at UC Berkeley, and her MFA at San Francisco State University. She is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish, 2005), for which she received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Mills College, and she lives with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland, CA.

Phebus Etienne (1965-2007)

sad news over the weekend, finding out that phebus etienne passed away. all i can say is that every kundiman reading i was at she was there with a warm smile and amazing energy. from what i am hearing from other folks, she was all that and much more.

Maison Poupée by Phebus Etienne
“Au revoir,” my mother whispered to the lemon tree.

To the unfinished second bedroom,
she vowed completion and left Mahotier.
I was five, wishing my world motionless
as the airplanes sunning on the runway,
daydreaming of sleep close to my father’s belly,
between his breathing and my mother’s.

At my aunt’s house, I tried not to leave
footprints on the parlor floor,
stayed away from the porch after sunset
when she covered her boyfriend with perfumed kisses,
but I couldn’t avoid the unbreakable switch. Sundays,

my father visited, but never waited,
if I was next door playing. He’d leave
two silver coins for champagne cola, a promise
for a matinee at the El Dorado. He walked
with me when his women could admire
the holiday lace on my braids. School breaks,

pampered at grandmother’s home, a window
overlooked the cherry tree on a rocky mound.
A large appetite made her laugh, so I ate through summer.
The man who cured his swollen feet with leeches,
who made sure I saw him naked in the outdoor
shower was in my nightmares, but there were
no welts on my skin. When I turned eight,

grandmother gave me a solid house.
Its miniature wooden pieces were scented with shellac.
I imagined us, three, a family in it; mother
at the gate as I crossed the stream
carrying warm bread; father,
under the avocados with a morning cigarette.
Before returning to a room in my mother’s house, I left
the doll house behind, its walls unglued,
arms of one resident missing.
It, too, had been ephemeral, fragile as my first home.

More info over at Tara’s blog
Phebus’s poems at 2nd Ave Poetry