Nací con este color: An Evening of Black Latinx Literature

Join Bay Area writers Raina J. León and Oliva Peña as they welcome Pittsburgh-based poet Malcolm Friend for an evening of Black Latinx Literature, hosted by Adobe Books. Following the reading will be a brief conversation and Q&A.

Malcolm Friend is a poet originally from the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. He received his BA from Vanderbilt University, and his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of the chapbook mxd kd mixtape (Glass Poetry, 2017) and the full length collection Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple (Inlandia Books, 2018), selected by Cynthia Arrieu-King as winner of the 2017 Hillary Gravendyk Prize. Together with JR Mahung, he is a member of Black Plantains, an Afrocaribbean poetry collective.

Raina J. León is an Afro-Latina, native Philadelphian, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator.  She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo.  She is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, and sombra: (dis)locate (2016) and the chapbook, profeta without refuge (2016).  She has received numerous fellowships and residencies and is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts.  She is an associate professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Olivia Peña is a Black-Salvadoran writer, storyteller, and MFA candidate at the University of San Francisco. Her work has appeared in The Acentos Review, Primary Treasure Magazine, and Spectrum Magazine.