Poet Brenda Cárdenas at Ripon College Nov. 18

Poet Brenda Cárdenas will give a reading of her work Wednesday, Nov. 18, on the Ripon College campus. The reading will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Lane Library. Books will be available for purchase, and all are welcome to attend.

Cárdenas is the author of Boomerang (Bilingual Review Press, 2009) and the chapbooks Bread of the Earth/The Last Colors with Roberto Harrison (2011) and From the Tongues of Brick and Stone (2005). She also co-edited Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest (2001).

Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Golden Shovel Anthology, Latina/o Poetics, Poetry, City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness, Angels of the Americlypse: New Latino/a Writing, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, Cuadernos de ALDEEU, Pilgrimage, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, Achiote Seeds and RATTLE, among others.

Cárdenas served as the Milwaukee Poet Laureate from 2010-2012. In 2014, the Library of Congress recorded a reading of her work for their Spotlight on U.S. Hispanic Writers. She is an associate professor in the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

In his introduction to Boomerang, Juan Felipe Herrerra writes, “This collection is volatile the way a panther or trickster coyote is capable of deft performance at night or at dawn when all is quiet and seems to be in order. As the boomerang rings and rattles across loves, deaths, stories, language(s), growled and lettered utterances, rhythm narratives, and lives it leaps across the last four decades. It demarcates a new era in Chicana and Latina poetics in the Américas.”

For samples of some of her poems, click here.

Cárdenas is appearing at Ripon College as part of the Visiting Writers Series.