Writers for Migrant Justice Washington DC

 

WRITERS FOR MIGRANT JUSTICE- DC

9/4/2019 | 6:30PM-8:30PM

OUR READERS

ARIFA AHSAN Arifa Ahsan is a PhD student in Biology at Georgetown University. In addition to science and research, she enjoys engaging in creative forms of expression and has recently taken up poetry. Having split her life in three countries (Bhutan, Bangladesh, and the US), she is fascinated by different cultural narratives and aspires to encapsulate them in her writings. 

MARICIELO AMPUDIA GUTIERREZ was born in Lima, Peru, but was raised in Virginia since she was five years old. After fifteen years, she was able to travel back to Peru with Advance Parole for a semester abroad. Currently, Maricielo is studying for her BFA in Creative Writing at George Mason University.

DERRICK WESTON BROWN holds an MFA from American University. He was the first Poet-In-Residence of Busboys and Poets. He has attended Cave Canem and VONA. His poems appear in many publications. His first book, Wisdom Teeth, was released in 2011 by PM Press. He resides in Mount Rainier, Maryland.

DORITT CARROLL is a native of Washington, DC.  She received her undergraduate and law degrees from Georgetown University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in North American Review, Coal City Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, Gargoyle, Nimrod, and Cherry Tree, among others. Her collection GLTTL STP was published by Brickhouse Books in 2013. Her chapbook Sorry You Are Not An Instant Winner was published in 2017 by Kattywompus.  She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and works as a poetry editor for The Baltimore Review.

MENA EL-TURKY is a public health advocate by day and by night the creator of @thenaseebdiaries, an Instagram account which showcases the diversity of Muslim women.  She has been writing and performing spoken word for less than two years and mostly writes about relationships and self love. She grew up in an Egyptian home outside of Philadelphia and moved to Washington, DC to work in international public health. She travels a lot of the year for work and most of her work has been written on long flights over the Atlantic.  She loves to dance, write, travel, watch stand up comedy and spend time with her friends and family

Born in Puerto Rico and raised in the mainland United States, TATIANA FIGUEROA RAMIREZ graduated with a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and is a VONA Voices Alumna, having worked with award winning poets Willie Perdomo and Danez Smith. Tatiana currently performs, teaches poetry workshops, and hosts events in the greater Washington DC area, having previously done so in New York, Philadelphia, Miami, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic at venues including New York University, The Kennedy Center, and The Howard Theatre. She recently published her first poetry collection Coconut Curls y Cafe con Leche available now.

PAGES MATAM is an international artist & educator from Cameroon, Central Africa, currently residing in Washington D.C. He is the Director of Poetry Events for Busboys and Poets, a Callaloo Fellow, and Write Bloody published author of The Heart of a Comet (2014), which won Best New Book 2014 from Beltway Poetry Quaterly and was a Teaching for Change bestseller. A national and 2x regional poetry slam champion, he has passions in the field of education, violence and abuse trauma work, immigration reform and youth advocacy. He has been a featured artist and performer on Upworthy, Huffington, Okay Africa, Macy’s, The Pentagon, the Kennedy Center, the Apollo Theater, BET Lyric Cafe, TV One’s Verses & Flow (Season 4 & 5), The Smithsonian Folklife Festival and the Smithsonian African Art Festival. He has performed across the world in Canada, Brazil, Costa Rica, France, Sweden, UAE. He is a proud gummy bear elitist, bowtie enthusiast, professional hugger and anime fanatic.

SAMI MIRANDA is a poet, teacher and visual artist. Born and raised in the Bronx, he has made his home in Washington, DC. He is the author of Departure, a chapbook of poems published by Central Square Press and We IS, a full length collection of poetry published by Zozobra Publishing. Sami is the secretary and curator of the American Poetry Museum.

MALKA OLDER is a writer, aid worker, and sociologist. Her science-fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, Book Riot, and the Washington Post, and shortlisted for the 2019 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award.With the sequels Null States (2017) and State Tectonics (2018), she completed the Centenal Cycle trilogy, a finalist for the Hugo Best Series Award of 2018. She is also the creator of the serial Ninth Step Station, currently running on Serial Box, and her short story collection And Other Disasters will come out in November 2019. Named Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs for 2015, she has more than a decade of field experience in humanitarian aid and development. Her doctoral work on the sociology of organizations at Sciences Po Paris explores the dynamics of post-disaster improvisation in governments.

ELIZABETH ST. VICTOR is a black Caribbean artist who works in poetry, playwriting, and translation. She wrote and produced plays through the Black Heritage Theater in New Haven, Connecticut at Yale, has translated the first Haitian-Creole language text of Felix Morrisseaux-Leroy’s Antigone into English, and guest-edited literary journals. Elizabeth’s areas of interest in art include gender and immigration, for which she has also represented 230 immigration applications on behalf of undocumented individuals in the Boston and Washington D.C. areas in immigration interviews. Elizabeth’s art reflects the relationships between conflict, intimacy, space, dislocation, and self-knowledge.

 

 

WRITERS FOR MIGRANT JUSTICE- DC

WITH SPECIAL THANKS

 

OUR NATIONAL ORGANIZERS:

WRITERS FOR MIGRANT JUSTICE- USA: JAVIER ZAMORA, JAN-HENRY GRAY, ANNI LIU and CHRISTOPHER SOTO decided to launch “Writers for Migrant Justice” in order to support the groundwork being done by Immigrant Families Together . Online, they want to raise $5K by Wednesday, September 4th in order to support detained / formerly detained migrants. They are also hosting protest readings at 40+ cities on September 4th.

OUR VENUE:

THE AMERICAN POETRY MUSEUM is an outreach museum that serves as a space for exhibitions and education centered on the subject of American poetry. The Museum collects objects centered around American poetry and presents events and educational poetry writing workshops for learners of all ages.  The Museum also hosts an annual exhibition each year comprised of art, photography and video about different subject matter using poetry as a tool for discussion.

OUR PRIZE DONORS:

ELIZABETH ACEVEDO is a New York Times bestselling author of The Poet X and With the Fire on High. Her critically-acclaimed debut novel, The Poet X, won the 2018 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. She is also the recipient of the Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Fiction, the CILIP Carnegie Medal, and the Boston Globe-Hornbook Award. Additionally, she was honored with the 2019 Pure Belpré Author Award for celebrating, affirming, and portraying Latinx culture and experience.  You have a chance to win all three of her books signed tonight! She couldn’t be here tonight but wanted to donate as a proud DC poet and child of immigrants!

SPLIT THIS ROCK– Donor of books and swaggy t-shirts! Hosts of my favourite literary festival–to quote Danez Smith, “AWP could never!”– Split This Rock cultivates, teaches, and celebrates poetry that bears witness to injustice and provokes social change. It calls poets to a greater role in public life and fosters a national network of socially engaged poets. Building the audience for poetry of provocation and witness from our home in the nation’s capital, they celebrate poetic diversity and the transformative power of the imagination.

PEN/FAULKNER FOUNDATION– Donor of books from their award recipients. The PEN/Faulkner Foundation celebrates literature and fosters connections between readers and writers to enrich and inspire both individuals and communities. They are dedicated to the notion that our culture thrives when stories from a diverse variety of perspectives enrich our daily lives and when no voices are excluded from our conversations.

Pen/Faulkner believes the written word plays an essential role in contributing to civil discourse and in creating empathy within and among communities.

EAST CITY BOOKSHOP is a proudly independent bookstore on Capitol Hill in Southeast Washington, DC. Half a block from Eastern Market Metro, East City is proudly women-owned and operated. It is one of two fully woman-owned brick and mortar bookstores in DC. Tonight they are offering advanced reader copies of nine books, a lovely tote bag and a $10 gift card.

And finally, thanks to IMMIGRANT FAMILIES TOGETHER for the incredible work they are doing at the border. Immigrant Families Together (IFT) was founded in June 2018 in response to the inhumane immigration policy separating families at the U.S./Mexico border. They pay bonds for parents in detention and work to reunite them with their children. Additionally, they support over 100 reunited families as they recover from their detention trauma and adjust to life in the U.S. while their asylum cases are adjudicated. All of the IFT volunteers are working pro-bono.

To give to IFT:

 

 

Writers for Migrant Justice DC – Schedule of Events- MC Version

9/4/2019 6:30-8:30 pm

  1. Welcome (Daria-Ann Martineau)
  2. Thanks (Daria) –
    1. National organizers – Javier Zamora, Jan-Henry Gray, Anni Liu, and Christopher Soto 
    2. Local sponsors-
      • The American Poetry Museum is an outreach museum that serves as a space for exhibitions and education centered on the subject of American poetry. The Museum collects objects centered around American poetry and presents events and educational poetry writing workshops for learners of all ages.  The Museum also hosts an annual exhibition each year comprised of art, photography and video about different subject matter using poetry as a tool for discussion.

Prize donors:

  • ELIZABETH ACEVEDO is a New York Times bestselling author of The Poet X and With the Fire on High. Her critically-acclaimed debut novel, The Poet X, won the 2018 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. She is also the recipient of the Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Fiction, the CILIP Carnegie Medal, and the Boston Globe-Hornbook Award. Additionally, she was honored with the 2019 Pure Belpré Author Award for celebrating, affirming, and portraying Latinx culture and experience.  You have a chance to win all three of her books signed tonight! She couldn’t be here tonight but wanted to donate as a proud DC poet and child of immigrants!
  • Split This Rock Donor of books and swaggy t-shirts. Hosts of my favourite literary festival–to quote Danez Smith, “AWP could never!”– Split This Rock cultivates, teaches, and celebrates poetry that bears witness to injustice and provokes social change. It calls poets to a greater role in public life and fosters a national network of socially engaged poets. Building the audience for poetry of provocation and witness from our home in the nation’s capital, they celebrate poetic diversity and the transformative power of the imagination.
  • Pen/Faulkner Foundation Donor of books from their award recipients. The PEN/Faulkner Foundation celebrates literature and fosters connections between readers and writers to enrich and inspire both individuals and communities. They are dedicated to the notion that our culture thrives when stories from a diverse variety of perspectives enrich our daily lives and when no voices are excluded from our conversations.

Pen/Faulkner believes the written word plays an essential role in contributing to civil discourse and in creating empathy within and among communities.

East City Bookshop is a proudly independent bookstore on Capitol Hill in Southeast Washington, DC. Half a block from Eastern Market Metro, East City is proudly women-owned and operated. Tonight they are offering advanced reader copies of nine books, a lovely tote bag and a $10 gift card.

  1. readers: Arifa Ahsan | Maricielo Ampudia | Derrick Weston Brown | Doritt Carroll | Mena El Turky | Tatiana Figueroa Ramirez | Pages Matam | Sami Miranda | Malka Older | Elizabeth St. Victor | 
  2. You! our audience
  1. With that I am going to thank you by announcing a prize for one of you—our first prize of the night! announce raffle prize #1 (Daria)
  2. encourage donations:
    1. Give to my Venmo, eventbrite, gofundmelink, cash or paypal directly to immigrant families together. If you are giving gofundme, please note you are giving from DC. We hope to raise $500 here tonight and also pay the museum their usual event hosting fee, since they agreed to waive it for this fundraiser.
  3. Moment for lives lost in detention

According to NBC News, 24 migrants have died in ICE custody this year, as of June 2019. That figure doesn’t include the deaths of at least four immigrants who died shortly after being released from ICE custody. It also doesn’t include the deaths of immigrants held by other federal agencies, including at least five migrant children who have died while in the custody of Customs and Border Protection or the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services charged with caring for unaccompanied migrant children who enter the U.S. As of June 2019, ICE detains more than 52,500 immigrants each day. It is very difficult for us to find the names of our deceased community members online because often the deaths of migrants are treated as a mere statistic and not the passing of somebody’s mother, father, sibling, cousin. As we have learned from the Black Lives Matter movement, it is important to say the names of our community members when they are taken by state violence. We want to acknowledge Black Lives Matter for their activism and for paving a way for migrant communities to also resist the detention and violence against us.

The names we are about to speak were provided by a LA Times Article (https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-migrant-child-border-deaths-20190524-story.html) which reported on six migrant children: five from Guatemala and one from El Salvador — who died in federal custody since from September 2018 to May 2019. Most of the children died after becoming ill in Border Patrol’s crowded temporary holding areas.

Darlyn Cristabel Cordova-Valle, 10, El Salvador

Jakelin Caal Maquín, 7, Guatemala

Felipe Gomez Alonzo, 8, Guatemala

Juan de León Gutiérrez, 16, Guatemala

Wilmer Josué Ramírez Vásquez, 2½, Guatemala

Carlos Hernandez Vásquez, 16, Guatemala

  1. First half of reading
  2. intro Pages Matam (Daria)

Pages Matam is an international artist & educator from Cameroon, Central Africa, currently residing in Washington D.C. He is the Director of Poetry Events for Busboys and Poets, a Callaloo Fellow, and Write Bloody published author of The Heart of a Comet (2014), which won Best New Book 2014 from Beltway Poetry Quaterly and was a Teaching for Change bestseller. A national and 2x regional poetry slam champion, he has passions in the field of education, violence and abuse trauma work, immigration reform and youth advocacy. He has been a featured artist and performer on Upworthy, Huffington, Okay Africa, Macy’s, The Pentagon, the Kennedy Center, the Apollo Theater, BET Lyric Cafe, TV One’s Verses & Flow (Season 4 & 5), The Smithsonian Folklife Festival and the Smithsonian African Art Festival. He has performed across the world in Canada, Brazil, Costa Rica, France, Sweden, UAE. He is a proud gummy bear elitist, bowtie enthusiast, professional hugger and anime fanatic.

  1. 8-10 min read (Pages)
  2. raffle drawing #2 (Pages)
  3. intro Elizabeth St. Victor (Daria)

Elizabeth is a black Caribbean artist who works in poetry, playwriting, and translation. She wrote and produced plays through the Black Heritage Theater in New Haven, Connecticut at Yale, has translated the first Haitian-Creole language text of Felix Morrisseaux-Leroy’s Antigone into English, and guest-edited literary journals. Elizabeth’s areas of interest in art include gender and immigration, for which she has also represented 230 immigration applications on behalf of undocumented individuals in the Boston and Washington D.C. areas in immigration interviews. Elizabeth’s art reflects the relationships between conflict, intimacy, space, dislocation, and self-knowledge.

  1. 8-10 min read- (Elizabeth)
  2. raffle drawing #3 (Elizabeth)
  3. intro Mena El-Turky (Daria)

Mena El-Turky is a public health advocate by day and by night the creator of @thenaseebdiaries, an Instagram account which showcases the diversity of Muslim women.  She has been writing and performing spoken word for less than two years and mostly writes about relationships and self love. She grew up in an Egyptian home outside of Philadelphia and moved to Washington, DC to work in international public health. She travels a lot of the year for work and most of her work has been written on long flights over the Atlantic.  She loves to dance, write, travel, watch stand up comedy and spend time with her friends and family

  1. 8-10 min read (Mena)
  2. raffle drawing #4 (Mena)
  3. intro Tatiana Figueroa Ramirez (Daria)

Born in Puerto Rico and raised in the mainland United States, Tatiana Figueroa Ramirez graduated with a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and is a VONA Voices Alumna, having worked with award winning poets Willie Perdomo and Danez Smith. Tatiana currently performs, teaches poetry workshops, and hosts events in the greater Washington DC area, having previously done so in New York, Philadelphia, Miami, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic at venues including New York University, The Kennedy Center, and The Howard Theatre. She recently published her first poetry collection Coconut Curls y Cafe con Leche available now.

  1. 8-10 min reading (Tatiana)
  2. raffle drawing #5 (Tatiana)
  3. intro Derrick Weston Brown (Daria)

Derrick Weston Brown holds an MFA from American University. He was the first Poet-In-Residence of Busboys and Poets. He has attended Cave Canem and VONA. His poems appear in many publications. His first book, Wisdom Teeth, was released in 2011 by PM Press. He resides in Mount Rainier, Maryland.

  1. 8-10 min reading (Derrick)
  2. raffle drawing #6 (Derrick)
  3. Encourage donations again (Daria)
  4. intermission (10 minutes)
    1. Bathroom’s in the back. Grab a free snack!
  5. intro Malka Older

Malka Older is a writer, aid worker, and sociologist. Her science-fiction political

thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, Book Riot, and

the Washington Post, and shortlisted for the 2019 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award.With the sequels Null States (2017) and State Tectonics (2018), she completed the Centenal Cycle trilogy, a finalist for the Hugo Best Series Award of 2018. She is also the creator of the serial Ninth Step Station, currently running on Serial Box, and her short story collection And Other Disasters will come out in November 2019. Named Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs for 2015, she has more than a decade of field experience in humanitarian aid and development. Her doctoral work on the sociology of organizations at Sciences Po Paris explores the dynamics of post-disaster improvisation in governments.

  1. 8-10 min reading (Malka)
  2. raffle drawing #7 (Malka)
  3. intro Doritt Carroll (Daria)

Doritt Carroll is a native of Washington, DC.  She received her undergraduate and law degrees from Georgetown University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in North American Review, Coal City Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, Gargoyle, Nimrod, and Cherry Tree, among others. Her collection GLTTL STP was published by Brickhouse Books in 2013. Her chapbook Sorry You Are Not An Instant Winner was published in 2017 by Kattywompus.  She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and works as a poetry editor for The Baltimore Review.

  1. 8-10 min reading (Doritt)
  2. raffle drawing #8 (Doritt)
  3. intro Maricielo Ampudia Gutierrez (Daria)

Maricielo Ampudia Gutierrez was born in Lima, Peru, but was raised in Virginia since she was five years old. After fifteen years, she was able to travel back to Peru with Advance Parole for a semester abroad. Currently, Maricielo is studying for her BFA in Creative Writing at George Mason University.

  1. 8-10 minute reading (Maricielo)
  2. raffle drawing #9 (Maricielo)
  3. intro Arifa Ahsan (Daria)

Arifa Ahsan is a PhD student in Biology at Georgetown University. In addition to science and research, she enjoys engaging in creative forms of expression and has recently taken up poetry. Having split her life in three countries (Bhutan, Bangladesh, and the US), she is fascinated by different cultural narratives and aspires to encapsulate them in her writings. 

  1. 8-10 minute reading (Arifa)
  2. raffle drawing #10 (Arifa)
  3. Intro Sami Miranda

Sami Miranda is a poet, teacher and visual artist. Born and raised in the Bronx,

he has made his home in Washington, DC. He is the author of Departure, a

chapbook of poems published by Central Square Press and We IS, a full length

collection of poetry published by Zozobra Publishing. Sami is the secretary and

curator of the American Poetry Museum.

  1. 8-10 min reading (Sami)
  2. raffle drawing #11 (Sami)
  3. “Church announcements” promote other museum events (Sami)
  4. Thank you and good night. Encourage donations again! (Daria)
  5. Stack them chairs- Daria and whoever wants to help!

 

_____
Organizers: Print (Poets reclaiming immigrant narratives and texts)

Venue: American Poetry Museum

Readers: Arifa Ahsan | Maricielo Ampudia | Derrick Weston Brown | Doritt Carroll | Mena El Turky | Tatiana Figueroa Ramirez | Sami Miranda | Malka Older | Elizabeth St. Victor