The Mission Poetry Series Kicks Off 14th Season at Santa Barbara Public Library
Santa Barbara Public Library invites the community to attend the first poetry reading of the 14th season of The Mission Poetry Series in the Faulkner Gallery at Central Library at 40 E Anapamu on Saturday, November 5, 2022 at 1 PM. The Mission Poetry Series is curated by Emma Trelles, who is also the current Santa Barbara Poet Laureate.
A Coming Home: Three Poets in Fall features three award-winning authors: Chloe Martinez, Sara Borjas, and Rick Benjamin. The title of the event is from the poem “Fifteen Balls of Feathers,” by Ada Limón, who is originally from Sonoma, California, and is currently the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. The event offers complimentary broadsides, poets’ books for sale, and the chance to meet and chat with our featured authors.
This reading is made possible by the Academy of American Poets with funds from the Mellon Foundation.
About the Featured Poets
CHLOE MARTINEZ is a poet and a scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press). Her poems and translations have appeared in Ploughshares, POETRY, The Common, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Barnard College, where she was a Mellon Mays Fellow, and received the PhD in Religious Studies from UC Santa Barbara. She is also a graduate of Boston University’s Creative Writing MA and the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where she was a Holden Scholar. She is the Program Coordinator for the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at Claremont McKenna College, as well as Lecturer in CMC's Department of Religious Studies. She lives in Claremont, CA with her husband and two daughters.
SARA BORJAS is a self-identified Xicanx pocha and a Fresno poet. Her debut collection, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff (Noemi Press, 2019) received a 2020 American Book Award. Sara was featured as one of Poets & Writers 2019 Debut Poets, and she has received fellowships from MacDowell, CantoMundo, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Postgraduate Writers Conference, and Community of Writers. Her work can be found in The Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Poem-a-Day by The Academy of American Poets, and Catapult, amongst others. She believes that all Black lives matter and will resist white supremacy until Black liberation is realized. She teaches creative writing at California State University, East Bay and the UCR Palm Desert Low Residency MFA Program, but stays rooted in Fresno.
RICK BENJAMIN lives on Chumash land in Goleta, California, and walks each day on indigenous trails. He teaches courses at the University of California Santa Barbara, among them poetry and community, the wild literature of ecology, and literatures of both social and juvenile justice, while also working among elders, young people at a local Boys and Girls Club, and in art museums and youth detention facilities. Among his works are the books of poetry, Passing Love, Floating World, Endless Distances, and Some Bodies in the Grief Bed, and his next book of poetry, The Mob Within the Heart, is due out in April. He served as poet laureate of Rhode Island from 2012- 2016.
Santa Barbara Public Library is a department of the City of Santa Barbara. Visit the Santa Barbara Public Library online at SBPLibrary.org for information about programs and services. All library programs are free and open to the public.
Contact: Molly Wetta, Library Services Manager
Phone: (805) 564-5642
Email: MWetta@SantaBarbaraCA.gov
Contact: Emma Trelles, Mission Poetry Series Curator
Email: eetrelles@pipeline.sbcc.edu