The 13th season of the Mission Poetry Series begins with a virtual reading.

Shine and Shine: Three Poets in Autumn features award-winning authors, Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon, Grisel Y. Acosta, and Luisa A. Igloria.  The title of the event is a phrase taken from the poem “The Window,” by feminist-activist-Beat poet Diane di Prima, who lived the majority of her life in California and who was the poet laureate of San Francisco.

The virtual reading will be held via Zoom, please see link below to register. The event is free and open to the public.  The event offers complimentary digital broadsides, links to poets’ books for sale, and a brief Q&A with our featured readers. The Mission Poetry Series is hosted by MPS program curator, and Santa Barbara Poet Laureate, Emma Trelles.

Zoom Registration
https://sbplibrary.org/missionpoetryseries

NATALIE DAMJANOVICH-NAPOLEON is an Australian-American writer and singer-songwriter from Fremantle, Australia. She spent the last decade in the United States, based in Santa Barbara, CA, where she worked as a Coordinator at the Santa Barbara City College Writing Center. Her erasure, free verse poetry and creative nonfiction has appeared in Meanjin, The Manifest-Station, Cordite, Found Poetry Review, Australian Poetry Journal and Writer's Digest (US). Recently, she was an International Guest of the Perth Poetry Festival. Her poem “First Blood: A Sestina” won the prestigious Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize (2018) through the University of Southern Queensland. In 2019 Ginninderra Press published her debut poetry collection First Blood, based on her girlhood experiences on a farm as a child of Croatian immigrants. In 2021 Natalie completed her second poetry collection on motherhood, the silencing of women's voices, and embracing of the unknown. Currently, Natalie is completing a PhD on erasure poetry and historic amnesia.

DR. GRISEL Y. ACOSTA is a full professor at the City University of New York-BCC. Her poetry collection, Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere, was a 2020 finalist for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, and is available from Get Fresh Books. She is the editor of Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity (Routledge, 2019), an anthology featuring over 30 scholarly and creative works by Latinas from throughout the United States. Her creative work is in Gathering of the Tribes, the Best American Poetry blog, Split this Rock, In Full Color: A Collection of Stories by Women of Color, and many other publications, and her scholarly articles and essays can be found in The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature, African American Women’s Language, The Kenyon Review, and VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. She received her Ph.D. in English—Latinx literature from the University of Texas at San Antonio and has presented and published her work in London; Cartagena; Catalonia; Buenos Aires; and throughout the United States. She is a Geraldine Dodge Foundation Poet, a Macondo Fellow, and the Creative Writing Editor at Chicana/Latina Studies Journal.

LUISA A. IGLORIA is originally from Baguio City and is the Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia. She is the author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Co-Winner, 2019 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Prize, Southern Illinois University Press, 2020); The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018); and 12 other books. Her poems are widely published or appearing in national and international anthologies, and print and online literary journals including Orion, Shenandoah, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, Diode, Missouri Review, Rattle, Poetry East, Poetry, Shanghai Literary Review, Cha, Hotel Amerika, Spoon River Poetry Review, and others. Luisa was the inaugural recipient of the 2015 Resurgence Poetry Prize (UK) for ecopoetry and is a Louis I. Jaffe Professor of English and Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Old Dominion University. She also leads workshops for The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk. In 2021, The Academy of American Poets awarded her one of 23 Poet Laureate Fellowships in support of public poetry projects. www.luisaigloria.com

֍֍

MPS program curator Emma Trelles is the daughter of Cuban immigrants and the author of Tropicalia 
(University of Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, a finalist for Foreword/Indies poetry book of the year, and a recommended read by The Rumpus. She is currently writing a second book of poems, Courage and the Clock. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry; Best of the Net; Verse Daily; Big Enough For Words: Poems and Vintage Photographs from California’s Central Coast; and others, and recent work appears or is forthcoming in New England Review;  Terrain’s Letter to America Series,  Zocalo Public Square; and SWWIM.  She has presented her work across the country, including The Bryant Park Reading Room in New York; The Poet and the Poem Series at the Library of Congress; Busboys & Poets in Washington D.C.; the Miami Book Fair; the Ojai Art Center; the Last Bookstore in Los Angeles; and the Palabra Pura series at the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago. A CantoMundo Fellow and the recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, she teaches at Santa Barbara City College. For more, visit emmatrelles.com

The Mission Poetry Series was founded in 2009 on the historic grounds of the Old Mission Santa Barbara by poet and activist Paul Fericano and Susan Blomstad, a sister in the Order of St. Francis. Paul and Susan co-directed the series for five seasons, from 2009 to 2014.

The Mission Poetry Series has been generously supported by partnerships with The Santa Barbara Public Library; The Santa Barbara Poetry Fund; Poets & Writers; Diana and Simon Raab; Instruments of Peace; and Letras Latinas, the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.