Poetry Night Reading Series: Maceo Montoya and León Salvatierra

The Poetry Night Reading Series is excited to feature poets Maceo Montoya and León Salvatierra at 7 PM on Thursday, March 7th, 2024, on the first floor of the John Natsoulas Gallery, 521 1st Street in Davis.

Maceo Montoya‘s first novel, The Scoundrel and the Optimist (Bilingual Review, 2010), was awarded the 2011 International Latino Book Award for Best First Book, and Latino Stories named him one of its “Top Ten New Latino Writers to Watch.” In 2014, University of New Mexico Press published his second novel, The Deportation of Wopper Barraza, and Copilot Press published Letters to the Poet from His Brother, a hybrid book combining images, prose poems, and essays. You Must Fight Them: A Novella and Stories (University of New Mexico Press, 2015) was a finalist for Foreword Review‘s INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award. Montoya also wrote and illustrated Chicano Movement for Beginners, a work of graphic nonfiction. His most recent novel is Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces, published by the University of Nevada Press in 2021.

Montoya is currently an associate professor in the Chicana/o Studies Department at UC Davis where he teaches courses on Chicano culture and literature. More information, including examples of his artwork, can be viewed at www.maceomontoya.com.

León Salvatierra is a poet from Nicaragua who migrated to the U.S. at the age of 15. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Davis (June 2020) and a Ph.D. in Latin American Literatures with an emphasis on U.S. Latinx literature from UC Berkeley (2014). He has published a book of poetry, Al Notre, with the University of Nicaragua UNAN-León (2012). The collection of poems, written in Spanish, explores the transnational experience of Central American migrants in their journey to the U.S.

Salvatierra’s poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Notre Dame Review, The Best American Poetry, Jung Journal Culture & Psyche, and The Wandering Song, Central American Writing in the United States. His newest manuscript, In the Land of Giants, is a collection of poems and creative nonfiction, written in English, that reflect critically on life in the United States from a diverse cast of voices from the Central American diaspora that emerged from the civil wars in the 1980s. A poem from this manuscript, “Teaching the Immigrant to Speak English” (his Spanish translation), won the 2020 Juana Goergen Poetry Prize for Best Poem in Spanish, written in the U.S. Currently, León is a lecturer in the Chicana/o Program at UC Davis, where he teaches Latinx literatures and cultures. He lives in Berkeley. 

This event will take place on the first floor of the John Natsoulas Gallery (521 1st Street in Davis) at 7 PM on Thursday, March 7th, 2024. An open mic will follow the featured performers. Open mic performances will be limited to four minutes or two items, whichever is shorter. As Robert Southey says, “Be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams – the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.” The open mic list typically fills by 6:50 PM, so please arrive early if you would like to perform something during the 8 o’clock hour. Attendees who request to be added to the list after 7 PM will be invited to try again at a subsequent event.

Find the Facebook event for this much anticipated evening of poetry at https://www.facebook.com/events/1839235609861566/ 

The Poetry Night Reading Series, taking place on first and third Thursdays of the month at 7 PM, is generously supported by the people and poets of the Sacramento Valley, by John Natsoulas, and by Thea and the other members of the staff at the John Natsoulas Gallery. Your host will be Dr. Andy Jones, the poet laureate emeritus of the City of Davis. This event is made possible by Katerina Hanks, producer of The Poetry Night Reading Series, with support from Helaina Flores and Cami Rothmuller.

Find out more about the Poetry Night Reading Series in Davis, California by visiting http://www.poetryindavis.com.