In this installation of "Meet the Readers & Musician" we hear from featured reader C. Rosalind Bell, Natalie Martìnez, and musician Kristin Allen-Zito.
Note the time change -- READING STARTS AT 7 pm, and it's gonna rule. The line up is stellar! In this round of "Meet Readers" we have Renee Simms and Tamiko Nimura.
Fine print: The Den is a bar, so event is 21+. No cover.
Based on feedback from all you fine, lovely attendees, the readings now begin at 7 pm!
What are you reading at Looseleaf?
New words from my project in motion: "Standing In The Middle Of A Secret"
Who’s a writer you’re stoked on right now? What’s exiting about their work?
Harryette Mullen. She's fearless and funny.
Is there a quote / soundtrack for how your week is going?
Love's In Need of Love Today (Stevie Wonder)
Anything coming up for you in the near future?
Continuing to write the louisiana project: Standing...
Bonus treat!
Read "Standing in the Middle of a Secret," a 2015 interview LL reader Tamiko Nimura did w/ C. Rosalind Bell in the Seattle Star.
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Natalie A. Martínez is a scholar and poet. She received her PhD in Rhetoric, Composition, and Linguistics from Arizona State University where her research and writing has focused on the rhetoric of anger and melancholia among queer LatinX writers and activists and the productive ways those emotions have been mobilized. She is a professor at Bellevue College and is currently working on a book-length poetry manuscript. Her poetry and non-fiction has been published in Ellipsis, Nepantla: A Journal of Queer Poets of Color, and the art zine, La Norda Specialo. |
What are you reading at Looseleaf?
I’m currently working on a poetry manuscript called, “The Body’s Reservations” that is loosely memoir. It can be read backward or forward. It’s not a linear collection. And one can enter it at any point of memory. It weaves in memories of family and place, the muscle memory of a serious illness I had after coming out at the age of 31, histories of my maternal grandmother, and my paternal grandfather, who just passed a few months ago. Both grandparents were storytellers, avid readers, artists who used their hands. My maternal grandmother was Metis [Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and Norwegian] and my paternal grandfather Mestizo [Chama and Farmington areas of New Mexico]. Both families experienced an incredible amount of displacement in terms of land historically. I’m constantly thinking of this land as an extension of their bodies.
I’m also always thinking about the impact of trauma and colonialism on the body over generations, and the bodies born to those bodies after. There’s a longing and inability to connect, a kind of paralysis sometimes with others because of these traumas, but once in awhile there’s joy too, when it happens. I’m interested in teasing out poetically those be/longings, and intimacies. And of course more optimistically, that possibility of connection.
Who’s a writer you’re stoked on right now? What’s exiting about their work?
I’m always reading six things at once!
Right now, in poetry I’m really enjoying Aracelis Girmay’s, The Black Maria, Ocean Vuong’s, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, and Ada Limón’s, Bright Dead Things. I love the way Vuong and Limón write desire in their poems and how I experience it. Girmay’s book inhabits the sea of black mourning. We’ve already drowned but she picks us up in the fishes of memory. And somehow, as a reader, I’m led out, out of sea, out of beauty. Beyond consolation.
Indira Allegra is a writer and artist based out of Oakland. Her Tex/tile Performances I’m really drawn to right now. She weaves in words with different materials on various textiles. She inverts the eye and our expectation of how to engage, feel, be queerly with a text, what is text and what is sensual, tactile.
I just read and bought a wonderful design book for a friend recently called, A New Nature: Architectural Conditions Between Liquid and Solid by Anders Abraham that may have well been a book of visual poetry.
My favorite local writer right now is Quenton Baker. The way he uses space on the page to make a percussive moment in language. I find him in the good company of writers such as Fred Moten and Dawn Lundy Martin. He has a reading at Open Books with poet, Fernando Pérez, on Feburary 3rd featuring his first full length book, This Glittering Republic.
Is there a quote / soundtrack for how your week is going?
Yes. The song,“Replica” by The XX.
Same right, same wrong / Only difference is that I'm the one / Second time around / Feels like the song’s already been sung / Mirroring situations, accurate imitation / Do I watch and repeat?
I’m seeing so many people I care about suffering a lot right now. I’m simultaneously holding that suffering with a lot of joy around new art and writing right now. This last week on a personal level, was about lost connections, lost possibilities, the inability to move or communicate with someone you so very wanted to understand and to understand you. Getting stuck in old patterns and old hurts. The inability to be touched. By contingency.
Anything coming up for you in the near future?
I’m one of the curators at The Alice Gallery in Seattle, where we have a writer in residence program. Writers and artist sometimes collaborate but always respond to the work of the artists. Our larger vision is to eventually have a small press and/or print small chapbooks, Zines, etc. for the artists and writers.
In October, Molly Mac and I will be co-curating a Visual Poetry show at The Alice, hoping to intervene into what has been historically seen as a male centered and Eurocentric poetic tradition.
Where can we find you online?
Check out Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, Issue 2. You can find a full pdf of the issue is available on Lambda Literary page. Founded and edited by the talented, Christopher Soto.
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What are you playing at Looseleaf?
I will be singing a few original songs from my upcoming album as well as some older ones.
Who’s a writer you’re stoked on right now? What’s exiting about their work?
Right now, I'm really into Donormaal. I think Christy is an innovative poet, musician and performer. Her lyrics are personal and political. She radiates power and joy as she plays. I love it.
Is there a quote / soundtrack for how your week is going?
My soundtrack for this week: Dime by Donormaal.
It helps me hold summer in my heart as we march through the winter.
Anything coming up for you in the near future?
I am excited about my new album that should be out in the fall! It's been a few years since my last album (The Atlas), so I am bursting a bit right now.
Also, I'll be playing a show at Chop Suey on February 21. I think it will be a fun evening!
Where can we find you online?
You can find me at kristinallenzitomusic.com
Or you can find me under my old band name, The Trucks.
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