Welcome to “The Sights + Sounds Show with Jeneé Darden, " where every week we tap into the Bay Area arts scene and bring you rich conversations with artists. On today’s show we give you a preview of the upcoming Flor Y Canto Literary Festival in the San Francisco Mission.
Today's show is about the Mission's literary legacy.
Josiah Luis Alderete & Ricardo Tavarez
The Mission District's very own literary festival returns to San Francisco on Friday June 20 to Saturday June 22 . It's called Flor Y Canto, which translates to flower and song. Spend three days listening to stories and prose in the Calle 24 Latino Cultural District. Here's the schedule.
Ricardo Tavarez and Josiah Luis Alderete are two of the festival's organizers. Ricardo is a Bay Area educator and arts organizer. KALW's Josiah Luis Alderete is the host of "Bay Poets" and co-owner of the bookstore Medicine for Nightmares. They talk about the festival's history and its importance during these tense times.
Lourdes Figueroa & soledad con carne
Poets Lourdes Figueroa and soledad con carne are performing at Flor Y Canto. soledad con carne describes themself as "a casually queer, intergalactic chicanx punk poet, working/poor multiple high school drop-out from San Fernando Valley."
Lourdes is a "queer chicanx oral poet and poetry filmmaker whose work is a dialogue of her lived experience when her family worked in el azadón — tilling of the soil under the blistering sun, in Yolo County."
They share a few pieces of their work in this interview.
soledad con carne's chapbook is "SFV OR DIE, Foo."
Lourdes Figueroa's chapbook is "Vuelta"
Rolando André López
"Not Your Papi's Utopia: Latinx Visions of Radical Hope" is an anthology where writers from the U.S. and Latin America don't necessarily write about a perfect future, but one where equity exists, along with respect for the environment. A few writers from the anthology will be reading at the Flor Y Canto Literary Festival next weekend, including Rolando André López. Rolando is an educator, writer, translator, bookseller, and poli-psycho-devil cartoonist from San Juan, Puerto Rico. He lives in Oakland.
Finally, Josiah Luis Alderete and Ricardo Tavarez perform their poetry at the end of the show.
