On 2 Tuesdays, Dec 8 and Dec 15, we celebrated the Cagibi 2020 print issue, and Macaron prize winners and finalists — purchase the issue at cagibilit.com/shop to follow along with the readers in the archived video available online for replay.
The two links to watch the events are:
> Dec 8: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/cagibi-2020-print-issue-night-1
> Dec 15: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/cagibi-2020-print-issue-night-2
December 8 Program
Order of Appearance. Readers may or may not read from the publication.
- Sylvie Bertrand & Christopher X. Shade
- Co-founding Editors Introduction: Welcome to Night 1
- Amelia Granger
- “The Qualities a Mother Shares With a Spider” (Nonfiction — Macaron Prize Finalist)
- Amelia Granger is currently at work on a collection of essays about her rocky journey to motherhood. Her non-fiction and personal essays have appeared in The Millions, BuzzFeed, The Guardian, and Popula, among others. Her fiction was nominated for a 2018 Pushcart Prize. She is a former journalist and holds a creative writing degree from the New School University in New York City. Amelia currently lives in London with her husband and her son.
- Brady Huggett
- “Everyone Else Around Here” (Fiction — Macaron Prize Winner)
- Brady Huggett’s fiction has been placed at Liar’s League, Fredericksburg Literary & Art Review and The King’s English. He was a finalist for the 2017 Tillie Olsen Short Story Award and a finalist for Boulevard’s 2019 Emerging Writers Nonfiction Award. He is also an award-nominated journalist with Nature Biotechnology. “Everyone Else Around Here” is adapted from a completed novel.
- David Allen Sullivan
- “Interrogation, Baghdad” (Poetry — Macaron Prize Winner)
- David Allen Sullivan is poet laureate of Santa Cruz County, California. His books include: Strong-Armed Angels, Every Seed of the Pomegranate, Bombs Have Not Breakfasted Yet (a book of co-translation with Abbas Kadhim from the Arabic of Iraqi Adnan Al-Sayegh), and Black Ice. He won the Mary Ballard Chapbook poetry prize for his book of poems Take Wing, and his book of poems about the year he spent as a Fulbright lecturer in China, Seed Shell Ash, is forthcoming from Salmon Press. Nightjars—a long narrative poem about the friendship between an Iraqi interpreter and a US soldier—is searching for a home, as is an anthology of poems about the paintings of Bosch and Bruegel he edited with his art historian mother who died recently. He teaches at Cabrillo College, where he edits Porter Gulch Review with his students, and lives in Santa Cruz with his family.
- Diana Sperrazza
- “Shelter” (Nonfiction — On The Ground series)
- Diana Sperrazza is the author of a novel My Townie Heart that deals with the effects of trauma and class on two sisters coming of age in the Seventies. She is now at work on a memoir about her own journey through agoraphobia. When she’s not writing, Sperrazza oversees production on crime and murder mystery shows for Investigation Discovery. She lives in New York City.
- George Franklin
- “Acquainted with the Night: On Teaching in Florida State Prisons” (Nonfiction — On The Ground series)
- George Franklin is the author of Traveling for No Good Reason (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), a bilingual collection, Among the Ruins / Entre las ruinas (Katakana Editores) and is the co-translator, along with the author, of Ximena Gómez’s Último día / Last Day (Katakana Editores). His chapbook, Travels of the Angel of Sorrow, is forthcoming from Blue Cedar Press, and a new full-length collection, Noise of the World, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Pre-Covid, he taught poetry classes in Florida state prisons, and he looks forward to when he can get back to work.
- Gloria Muñoz
- “Startle Reflex” (Poetry — Macaron Prize Finalist)
- Gloria Muñoz is the author of Danzirly / Dawn’s Early and of the chapbook Your Biome Has Found You. She holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and University of South Florida, and she teaches at Eckerd College.
- Janice Northerns
- “My Brothers Teach Me What It Means to Grow Up Male in West Texas” (Poetry)
- Janice Northerns is the author of Some Electric Hum (Lamar University Literary Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals, including Ploughshares, The Laurel Review, The Chariton Review, and Southwestern American Literature. Awards include a Brush Creek Foundation residency, a Sewanee Writers’ Conference scholarship, second place in Southwest Review’s 2017 Marr Poetry Contest, and the Robert S. Newton Creative Writing Award from Texas Tech University. Northerns grew up on a farm in rural West Texas and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas Tech University. After teaching for many years at the college and high school levels, she retired last year and now enjoys writing full time. She and her husband live in southwest Kansas.
- Jen Stewart Fueston
- “Revised Common Liturgy” (Poetry)
- Jen Stewart Fueston is the author of the newly released collection Madonna, Complex (Cascade Books 2020) as well as two chapbooks, Visitations (Finishing Line Press 2015) and Latch (River Glass Books 2019). Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and are forthcoming in Western Humanities Review, Spoon River Poetry Review and AGNI. She has taught writing at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA, as well as internationally in Hungary, Turkey, and Lithuania. She lives in Longmont, Colorado, with her husband and two young sons.
- Karen Laws
- “On the Ground: To The Other Side In Tijuana” (Nonfiction — On The Ground series)
- Karen Laws lives in Berkeley and is writing a novel about the life and death of a Mexican woman, as seen through the eyes of her three American-born sons. Her short story “Holding Down the Fort” appeared in Cagibi Issue 3. Other stories have appeared in Gravel, The Cimarron Review, The Antioch Review, The Georgia Review, Confrontation, and Zyzzyva.
- Keira Sinclair
- “Selfie Swipe” (Fiction)
- Keira Sinclair is a Sydney-based writer of fiction and creative nonfiction, and editor of such works for others. She longs to visit Antarctica and write about its life and environment. Her website is keirasinclair.com.
December 15 Program
Order of Appearance. Readers may or may not read from the publication.
- Sylvie Bertrand & Christopher X. Shade
- Welcome to Night 2
- Keith Donnell Jr.
- “Sound Translations: Oath of Office / Miranda Warnings” (Poetry — On The Ground series)
- Keith Donnell Jr. is a Bay Area poet and book editor. His recent work has appeared in Puerto del Sol’s Black Voices Series, jubilat, Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review, and the 2019 edition of Best American Nonrequired Reading. His first collection, the move, is forthcoming with Nomadic Press in 2021.
- Kimberly O’Connor
- “My American Childhood in Reverse” (Poetry)
- Kimberly O’Connor is a North Carolina native who now lives in Colorado, where she works for Lighthouse Writers. Her first book, White Lung, is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in summer 2021.
- Marek Kulig
- “My grandpa asks me to say Polish things in English” (Poetry)
- Marek Kulig was born in Poland and grew up in New Jersey. A founding member of the Network of Eastern European Writers (NEEW), his writing appears in Seneca Review, Entropy, National Translation Month, and elsewhere.
- Megan Taylor-DiCenzo
- “Fourteen Stories in the Life of a Tire Saleswoman” (Nonfiction)
- Megan Taylor-DiCenzo spent 7 years running her family’s tire shop, and she’s working on a memoir about it. When Megan’s not writing, you can find her reading Anne Sexton’s poetry, listening to The Notorious B.I.G. and ASMR, and going on adventures with her wife. She keeps a marble that looks like the Earth, a squishy, and a gastrolith from the Jurassic period in her pocketbook.
- Michael Cronin
- “Rain of Tears: On the Ground in Reggio Calabria” (Nonfiction — On The Ground series)
- Michael Cronin is Irish and grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He has been living and working in Italy since 1987 and currently lives between Reggio Calabria and Cosenza, where he teaches at the University of Calabria.
- Michael Klein
- “Cradle” (Nonfiction)
- Michael Klein is a member of the resistance. He teaches at Hunter College and Goddard College. His current book is When I Was a Twin.
- Michelle Quay
- Reading “In Translation: My Button Eyes // چشمهای دکمهای من” by Bizhan Najdi, trans. Michelle Quay
- Michelle Quay holds a PhD in Persian Literature from the University of Cambridge, and is currently Assistant Instructional Professor in Persian at the University of Chicago. Her literary translation work has appeared in Asymptote Journal, World Literature Today, Exchanges, Two Lines, and elsewhere. Dr. Quay’s interest in Persian was sparked at a young age growing up in Southern California in close proximity to the largest Iranian diaspora community in the United States.
- Micki Blenkush
- “New Year’s Morning” (Poetry)
- Micki Blenkush is the author of Now We Will Speak in Flowers published by Blue Light Press. She was selected as a 2017-2018 fellow in poetry for the Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series program and is a 2015 & 2019 recipient of grants awarded through the Central MN Arts Board. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals including Josephine Quarterly, Typishly, and Crab Creek Review. She lives in St. Cloud, Minnesota and works as a social worker. Her website is mickiblenkush.com.
- Nancy Hightower
- “To My Father: A Letter From The Other Woman” (Nonfiction — On The Ground series)
- Nancy Hightower has published work in Joyland, Spry, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Longleaf Review, Entropy, and Sundog Lit, among others. Her novel Elementarí Rising came out from Pink Narcissus Press in September 2013 and her first collection of poetry, The Acolyte, was published in 2015. From 2014-2016 she was the monthly science fiction and fantasy reviewer for The Washington Post. Currently, she is working on a memoir about growing up in the evangelical South and teaches at Hunter College.
- Rachel Wysoker
- “Expecting” (Nonfiction — Macaron Prize Winner)
- Rachel Wysoker earned a BFA in printmaking from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and did not complete her MA in Latin American literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (university strike and shutdown, then babies). She also worked in the theatre and did translation and editing. “Expecting” is one of a collection of stories and essays about mothering, international adoption, uncertainty, memory, and not following the rules. She is most comfortable living in other languages.
- Ximena Gómez and George Franklin
- Reading “Oedipal Triad // Tríada edípica” by Ximena Gómez, co-translated by Ximena Gómez and George Franklin
- Ximena Gómez is a Colombian poet, psychologist, and translator, who now lives in Miami. Her poems have appeared in several Spanish magazines and bilingually in Sheila-Na-Gig, Nashville Review, Cigar City, The Laurel Review, Gulf Stream, The Wild Word and Cagibi. She was finalist for the Best of the Net award for 2018 with her poem “Last Day” and the runner-up for Gulfstream Contest 2019. A collection of her poems, Habitación con moscas, was published by Editorial Torremozas (Madrid 2016), and a bilingual collection of her poetry Último día / Last Day, was published by Katacama Editores (2019). She is the translator of George Franklin’s bilingual collection of poems, Among the Ruins / Entre las ruinas (Katakana Editores 2018). She is a contributor-translator to 32 Poems / 32 Poemas of Hyam Plutzik, the first collection of Plutzik’s work translated into Spanish, edited by Edward Moran (Suburbano Ediciones in Miami 2020).
