Kristin Dykstra, Angelica Julia Dávila and Brenda Cárdenas
Friday February 28th, 2025 @ 7:00PM - 8:00PM
Join us as we welcome poets Brenda Cárdenas, Angelica Julia Dávila and Kristin Dykstra to the store for a reading and discussion of their work.
Current Wisconsin Poet Laureate Brenda Cárdenas has authored Trace (Red Hen Press, 2023), winner of the 2023 Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry and silver winner of Foreword Review’s Indie Poetry Prize; Boomerang (Bilingual Press); and three chapbooks. She also co-edited Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance and Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest. Her poems and essays have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Braving the Body, Latinx Poetics: The Art of Poetry, Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Anthology, and Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, among others. Cárdenas has also enjoyed collaborating with musicians, composers, visual artists, and choreographers. In 2024, her poem “Para los Tin-Tun-Teros,” set to choral music by Daniel Afonso, was performed by the National Concert Chorus at Carnegie Hall. Cárdenas is Professor Emerita of English at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Angelica Julia Dávila is a writer, performer, comedian and self-advocate. She is a PhD Candidate at the Program for Writers at University of Illinois at Chicago where she teaches creative writing and composition. She writes fiction, poetry, essays, and comedy. Her literary work has been published in a variety of magazines, and she was an invited poet for 2024’s Poesía en Abril (International Festival of Spanish Poetry in Chicago) and was a featured poet in “Pop-up Gallery Readings with Contratiempo” as part of ECOS: A Chicago Latine Poetry Festival by the Poetry Foundation. Her forthcoming poetry chapbook Bilingual Bitch (Abode Press) will be released on March 15, 2025. Angelica’s work is an exploration of the bilingual Latine identity, autistic self-expression, and mental borderlands. Angelica is also a comedian, improviser, and co-producer of “Antojitos Fest: Chicago’s Latin American Comedy Festival” and the monthly Latinx variety show “La Hora de Antojitos” at Logan Square Improv Theater, which includes poetry, music, and other artistic forms. Through her work as a Graduate Assistant for UIC’s Center for Latinx Literature of the America’s, Angelica has coordinated literary programming, such as the “Radical Poetry & Performance Reading Series” at Madison Street Books, and “Latinx Literature NOW!”, an annual conference for Latinx writers at UIC’s Institute for the Humanities. Angelica also organized literary programming for Lit & Luz Festival: of Literature, Language, and Art as their Director of Sponsorships & Partnerships.
Kristin Dykstra is an award-winning writer, literary translator, and scholar. She is the author of the prose poetry collection, Dissonance, winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize (The University of Chicago Press, 2025). Her translation of The Star-Spangled Brand, by Marcelo Morales, appeared in early 2025 (Veliz Books). It followed the 2024 release of Jigs and Lures, by Reina María Rodríguez (Alliteration Publishing), for which Dykstra’s translation was supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is principal translator of The Winter Garden Photograph, also by Rodríguez, winner of the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and finalist for the National Translation Award. Her translation of 13 lunas 13, by Tina Escaja, won a Gold Medal from the International Latino Book Awards program (2023). Previously Dykstra translated books by Amanda Berenguer, Juan Carlos Flores, Rito Ramón Aroche, Ángel Escobar, and Omar Pérez, well as additional works by Escaja, Morales and Rodríguez. She coedited the cross-cultural magazine Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas / Nueva escritura de las Américas, issues 7–16, with Roberto Tejada and Gabriel Bernal Granados.