august, 2019
Event Details
Inner Moonlight welcomes Machele Johnson and Sarah Friday this month! Brief open mic to follow. Bring a poem. We dare you.
Machele Johnson is a Dallas based poet & flutist. She has shared her work throughout the metroplex for about 3 years. A melomaniac since birth, Machele’s poetry is abstract detailing the highs and woes of a sound sensitive human. She has a new chapbook available, I’m Sorry, But it’s Still Awfully Loud in Here. For more info visit MacsWordScraps.com.
Sarah Friday is a queer performance artist and poet whose work centers intersectional feminist issues utilizing the body as the primary means of expression and critique. Her work explores the body as both a site and sight of activity, expression, pain, and pleasure. Sarah received her M.A. from the University of North Texas in 2016.
Inner Moonlight is the second Wednesday of every month. Mark your calendar and we’ll see you there!
“Follow your inner moonlight, don’t hide the madness.”
—Allen Ginsberg, from On Being a Writer
Óscar Martínez is a writer and journalist from El Savador. He writes for ElFaro.net, the first online newspaper in Latin America. The original edition of his book Los migrantes que no importan was translated to English as The Beast. Martínez is currently writing chronicles and articles for El Faro’s project, Sala Negra, investigating gang violence in Latin America. In 2008, Martínez won the Fernando Benítez National Journalism Prize in Mexico, and in 2009, he was awarded the Human Rights Prize at the José Simeón Cañas Central American University in El Salvador. Martinez has ridden the Beast eight times himself, interviewing people on their way to the U.S
Dianne Solis is an american journalist. Her stories have taken her to post-Katrina New Orleans, inside families fractured by addiction to starter heroin, to immigration courts for children, and to a mosque where the Ramadan fast was broken with a FBI agent. As a foreign correspondent with The Wall Street Journal and a Texas-based reporter with the Dallas Morning News, she’s written on narcotics, gangs and the impact of drug violence and corruption on ordinary people. She also has lectured on reporting in immigrant communities caught in the most significant crackdown in decades. She was a Nieman fellow at Harvard University.
John Gibler is an American journalist who predominately writes from and about Mexico. He is the author of Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt, To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War and I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us: An Oral History of the Attacks Against the Students of Ayotzinapa. He is also correspondent for Pacifica Radio’s KPFA in Mexico. He has reported on the ground from the Zapatistas Other Campaign, the protests against electoral fraud in Mexico City, and the uprising in Oaxaca. He has reported for Left Turn, In These Times, Common Dreams, Yes! Magazine, Colorlines and Democracy Now!
Miriam Toews is a Canadian writer, best known for her novels A Complicated Kindness and All My Puny Sorrows. She has won a number of literary prizes including the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award for body of work. She is also a two-time finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a two-time winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
Leni Zumas is an American writer. She won the 2019 Oregon Book Award for her national bestselling novel Red Clocks, which was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Neukom Prize for Speculative Fiction. Red Clocks was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and was named a Best Book of 2018 by The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, Entropy, and the New York Public Library. Vulture called it one of the 100 Most Important Books of the 21st Century So Far.
Cristina Rivera Garza is a Mexican author and professor best known for her fictional work, with various novels such as Nadie me verá llorar (No One Will See Me Cry) winning a number of Mexico’s highest literary awards as well as awards abroad. The author was born in the state of Tamaulipas, near the U.S. border and has developed her career in teaching and writing on both sides of the border. She has taught history and creative writing at various universities Awards include the Juan Vicente Melo National Short Story Award, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize (the only author to win this award twice) and the Anna Seghers International Prize.
Yásnaya Elena Aguilar is a Mexican linguist, writer, translator, human rights activist and Ayuujk researcher. She works with Ayuujk, Spanish and English languages. She is member of Colegio Mixe, a collective that researches and promotes the Mixe culture. She has taken part and given talks, conferences and workshops in both national and international forums. In February 2019 she was invited to the ordinary session of the 14th Legislature in the Chamber of Deputies within the framework of the International Year of Indigenous Languages to give a speech in Mixe, in which she alluded the condition of Mexico’s indigenous languages
Jon Lee Anderson is an American biographer, author, investigative reporter, war correspondent and staff writer for The New Yorker, reporting from war zones such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Uganda, Israel, El Salvador, Ireland, Lebanon, Iran, and throughout the Middle East as well as during Hurricane Katrina rescue efforts with K38 Water Safety as documented in the New Yorker article Leaving Desire. Anderson has also written for The New York Times, Harper’s, Life, and The Nation. Anderson has profiled political leaders such as Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Augusto Pinochet.
Ben Fountain is an American fiction writer. He has won many awards including a PEN/Hemingway award for Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories (2007) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for his debut novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk(2012). His latest book Beautiful Country Burn Againnarrates a shocking year in American politics, moving from the early days of the Iowa caucus to the crystalizing moments of the Democratic and Republican national conventions, and culminating in the aftershocks of the weeks following election night.