Our Voices: Writing and Teaching Afro-Latin@ Perspectives
2:00pm-3:30pm
Afro-Latin@ published writers of fiction, poetry, and prose discuss why and how they approach race and ethnicity in their work. What can Black Latin@ writers do to raise awareness of our issues through youth literature and in the schools? What is involved in the creation of accurate portrayals of Afro-Latin@s and their personal and social challenges? What aspects of Afro-Latin@ literary work generates the most lively responses among diverse reading audiences?
Afro-Latin@ published writers of fiction, poetry, and prose discuss why and how they approach race and ethnicity in their work. What can Black Latin@ writers do to raise awareness of our issues through youth literature and in the schools? What is involved in the creation of accurate portrayals of Afro-Latin@s and their personal and social challenges? What aspects of Afro-Latin@ literary work generates the most lively responses among diverse reading audiences?
Presenters
Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa was born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York City. After a thirty-year career as educator and librarian for the New York City public schools, she has dedicated herself to a second career in writing. She has won the Bronx Council on the Arts ACE and BRIO Awards, as well as a BCA Literary Arts Fellowship. In 2010 Go on Girl, a national Black women’s reading group selected her as best new author and best female author of 2010 of the year. Daughters of the Stone was selected as finalist for the 2010 PEN America Bingham Literary Award. Dahlma is presently working on Carisa Stories, a collection of short fiction, and Writing on the Road, a collection of travel memoirs.
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Ray Felix, a Bronx native, was born in 1973. A comic artist known for his shocking imagery and social commentary, he is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts (1999/ 2000). His work includes the comic books, God: The Second Coming; No-1 Anthology; O.D's H.; Bronx Heroes; Runaway Slave; A World Without Superheroes; and his latest release The Adventures of Baron Ambrosia, based on the hit Bronxnet and NYC-TV comedy cooking show, Bronx Flavor. He also has freelanced with several off-Broadway and film productions.
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Born in New York and raised in a public housing project, Torrey Maldonado overcame neighborhood poverty and violence to graduate from Vassar College with a BA in Sociology and earn a Master’s Degree in Educational Administration from Baruch College. He has taught in a public school for nearly ten years. His debut novel Secret Saturdays is the tale of two Black Latino adolescents and was inspired by his own and his students' struggles with friends, family, being their true selves, bullying, and tough choices. It made the American Library Association's Quick Pick List for Young Adults and both Kansas and Pennsylvania have adopted it into their Middle and High School Reading-Circles.
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Carmen Mojica is an Afro-Dominican born and raised in the Bronx. She is a writer, teaching artist and birth doula. The focus of her multidimensional work is the empowerment of women and people of the African Diaspora. In addition to her poetry and presentations, she also teaches writing workshops that aim to encourage healing through releasing emotions in words. In October 2009, she completed and self-published her literary work, Hija De Mi Madre (My Mother’s Daughter), which is a combination of memoirs, poems and research material that not only explores the effects of race on identity but also shares her life experience as an example.
Presentation: Hija De Mi Madre (My Mother’s Daughter) – The Effects of Racism & Sexism on the Afro-Latina identity |
Kevin Alberto Sabio is a writer, screenwriter, and activist. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He attended Newbury College, and graduated from Southern Connecticut State University. He is the published author of Raise Your Brown Black Fist: The Political Shouts of an Angry Afro-Latino (2010). He is a member of the Universal Negro Improvement Association & African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) and founder and organizer of the Universal Africana Literary Arts Movement & Expo (a/k/a Black CapaCity Literary Arts Festival), located in Baltimore, MD, where he currently resides.
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Moderator
Willie Perdomo is the author of two volumes of poetry, Where a Nickel Costs a Dime and Smoking Lovely, which received a PEN Open Book Award. He has also been published inThe New York Times Magazine, Bomb, Poems of New York, and The Harlem Reader. He has been a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Woolrich Fellow in Creative Writing at Columbia University, and is a three-time Fellow in Poetry and Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has been on the faculty of the VONA Writing Workshops, National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, and currently teaches at Fordham University. He is founder/publisher of Cypher Books.
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