Ep. 22: Las Peregrinas

The BWOMS Podcast

On this episode, we welcome Las Peregrinas, California poets on tour of the Southwest: Marisol Baca, Yaccaira Salvatierra, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, and Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo. We discuss the creation of the tour, traveling and reading along border communities, each of their recent publications, and we turn the set into an open mic and each reads a selection of their work. Hosted by Richie David Marrufo, project director of The Barbed Wire Open Mic Series, in studio at Power at the Pass Marisol Baca is the author of Tremor (Three Mile Harbor Press). She has been published in Narrative Northeast, Riverlit, Shadowed: An Anthology of Women Writers, Acentos Review, among other publications. She received her Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University where she won the Robert Chasen poetry award for her poem, Revelato. She is also a recipient of the Andres Montoya poetry scholarship. Currently, Marisol is an English professor at Fresno City College. Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, a first-generation Chicana, is the author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications 2016). A former Steinbeck Fellow, Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grantee, she’s received residencies from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, National Parks Arts Foundation and Poetry Foundation. Her work is published in Acentos Review, CALYX, crazyhorse, and American Poetry Review among others. A dramatization of her poem "Our Lady of the Water Gallons," directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño, can be viewed at latinopia.com. She is a cofounder of Women Who Submit and a member of Macondo Writers’ Workshop. Yaccaira Salvatierra’s poems have appeared in Huizache, Diálogo, Puerto del Sol, and Rattle among others. She is a VONA alumna, the recipient of the Dorrit Sibley Award for achievement in poetry, and the 2015 winner of the Puerto del Sol Poetry Prize. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net. An educator and art instructor, she lives in San José, California with her two sons. Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley borderlands to formerly undocumented Mexican immigrants. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Buzzfeed Reader, Epiphany, Apogee, Sporklet, PBS Newshour, Poor Claudia, Waxwing, The Wanderer, DIAGRAM, The Feminist Wire, The Poetry Foundation Harriet Blog, and others. She has served as an editor for the Bettering American Poetry project and is a CantoMundo Fellow. She is the author of Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series, 2017). She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, but her hometown is Houston, Texas. ---- Intro: "The BWOMS Podcast, Intro V.2" by Richie David Marrufo Outro: "Juxtaposition" (instrumental) by Luis Camberos Presented by Power at the Pass El Paso, TX 2018