Join us for a poetry reading to celebrate Ananda Lima's new collection Mother/land in paperback with special guest poets Marina Carreira, Emily Lee Luan, Xandria Phillips, and Felicia Zamora. Mother/land engages in the themes of language and legacy through mutli-lingual lyricism, something Word Up celebrates. There will be readings from each poet, followed by a brief conversation.
Mother/land, winner of the 2020 Hudson Prize, is focused on the intersection of motherhood and immigration and its effects on a speaker’s relationship to place, others and self. It investigates the mutual and compounding complications of these two shifts in identity while examining legacy, history, ancestry, land, home, and language. The collection is heavily focused on the latter, including formal experimentation with hybridity and polyvocality, combining English and Portuguese, interrogating translation and transforming traditional repeating poetic forms. These poems from the perspective of an immigrant mother of an American child create a complex picture of the beauty, danger and parental love the speaker finds and the legacy she brings to her reluctant new motherland.
Ananda Lima’s poetry collection Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021) is the winner of the Hudson Prize. She is also the author of two poetry chapbooks (Amblyopia, Bull City Press, 2020, and Translation, Paper Nautilus, 2019), a fiction chapbook (Tropicália, Newfound, 2021), and a poetry and photography chapbook (Vigil, Get Fresh Books, 2021). Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, the Birmingham Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark
Marina Carreira (she/they) is a queer Luso-American poet artist from Newark, NJ. She is the author of tantotanto (Cavankerry Press, forthcoming 2022), Save the Bathwater (Get Fresh Books, 2018) and I Sing to That Bird Knowing It Won’t Sing Back (Finishing Line Press, 2017). She has exhibited her art at Morris Museum, ArtFront Galleries, West Orange Arts Council, Monmouth University Center for the Arts, among others. Her work investigates identity as it relates to gender, urban, queer, and bicultural first-generation spaces. Keep up with her at hellomarinacarreira.com.
Emily Lee Luan is a Taiwanese American poet and essayist. She is the author of I Watch the Boughs, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for a 2020 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A 2020 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a 2022 Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry (2021), Best New Poets (2019), American Poetry Review, The Offing, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Rutgers University-Newark and lives in Brooklyn.
Xandria Phillips is a poet and visual artist from rural Ohio. The recipient of a Whiting Award, and a LAMBDA Literary Award for their book HULL (Nightboat Books 2019), Xandria has received fellowships from Brown University, The Sewanee Writer’s Conference, The Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and The Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Their work has been featured in Berlin Quarterly, Crazyhorse, POETS.org, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.
Felicia Zamora is the author of six poetry books including, I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize (University of Iowa Press, 2021), Quotient (forthcoming from Tinderbox Editions), Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner (Red Hen Press, 2020), and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner (University of Notre Dame Press). A CantoMundo and Ragdale Foundation fellow, she won the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Wabash Prize for Poetry and the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Georgia Review, Guernica, Missouri Review Poem-of-the-Week, Orion
