Latinx Poetics in Motion

A stellar line-up of Latinx poets, in a multidisciplinary arts night were poetry puts together music and dance. Featuring poets Maia Elsner, Janel Pineda, Yvette Siegert, Sofía Vaisman. The music collective Witchas! will delight us with sang poems and the dance group Somos Chibchas will put movement to some strong lyrics.

Open mic will be open, so, wish to share your own work on stage? Sign up on the night to enter your name into the open mic lucky dip draw – 6 slots 3 minutes each, selected at random… bring your spoken word/poem and join us!

Maia Elsner was born in London to Mexican and Polish Jewish parents. Her debut collection, overrun by wild boars (flipped eye, 2021), explores the dislocation of lives, communities, objects, and histories through migration and the legacies of colonisation. Her work has been published in British, American, Canadian and Irish journals, and has been widely anthologised. Currently, she is doing an MFA at the University of Michigan. 

Janel Pineda is a Los-Angeles born Salvadoran poet, educator, and the author of Lineage of Rain (Haymarket Books, 2021). Janel holds an MA in Creative Writing and Education from Goldsmiths, University of London and is currently pursuing an MPhil in Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge.

Yvette Siegert is the author of Atmospheric Ghost Lights, selected for the 2021 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship Award. Her debut collection, a winner of the James Berry Poetry Prize, explores the civil war in El Salvador and is forthcoming from Bloodaxe Books. Recent translations include Chantal Maillard’s Killing Plato (New Directions), shortlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and Alejandra Pizarnik’s Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962–1972 (New Directions), which won the Best Translated Book Award.  

Sofía Vaisman Maturana was born in Santiago, Chile 1993. Composer, poet, and music improviser. In 2019 awarded with the Victorina Press Poetry Awards (runner up), London. She currently publishes monthly chronicles of her experience as a boater for ‘Salvoconducta fanzine’ (Santiago, Chile).

Witchas: a music collective based in London created by Latin American migrant women and the daughters of Latin American migrants. Witchas! fusions bullerengue and other afro latin rhythms to create and experiment with new sounds and to inhabit cultural spaces usually dominated by male presence.

Somos Chibchas is a cultural association involving dance, music, visual arts and theater, focused on research, practice, preservation and diffusion of traditional Colombian culture and dances. Based on the study of old and new rhythms mostly focused on traditional dance movements and how they influence new dances developed for different genres of music.