Open Door Series: Marcy Rae Henry & David Trinidad
Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street
Free admission, register in advance here
At 30 minutes before event start, guests with Eventbrite tickets will have priority entry to the performance space on a first-come, first-served basis. At 15 minutes prior to event start, the performance space is open to all guests. Seating capacity is limited. Eventbrite reservations do not guarantee entry or reserved seating.
The Open Door series presents work from Chicago’s new and emerging poets and highlights the area’s outstanding writing programs. Each hour-long event features readings by two Chicagoland writing program instructors and two of their current or recent students. November’s Open Door reading series features Marcy Rae Henry and student Athena Guizar, and David Trinidad and student Leonard Morrison.
Marcy Rae Henry is a Latina born and raised in Mexican-America/The Borderlands. She is an interdisciplinary artist with no social media accounts. Her writing and visual art appears in or is forthcoming in Beautiful Losers, The Acentos Review, World Haiku Review, Chicago Literati, The Chaffey Review, Shanghai Literary Review, Damaged Goods Press/TQ Review, New Mexico Review, The Wild Word, Thimble Literary Magazine and AHF (Alternate History Fiction) Magazine. Her publication, The CTA Chronicles, received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant and Cumbia Therapy, her collection of Spanglish stories, received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. She recently received a Luso-American Fellowship to attend “Writing The Luso Experience” in Lisbon, Portugal. Ms. M.R. Henry is currently seeking publication of two novellas. She is an Associate Professor of Humanities and Fine Arts at Harold Washington College Chicago.
Athena Guizar Ablang has been writing poetry and short stories for over 20 years. She dances, volunteers, has traveled to 33 countries, and currently co-hosts and produces “Primerosas” (first and powerful), a podcast that explores first-generation, low-income, social justice and Latinidad. Primerosas works to democratize knowledge and connect the elitism of education to the humble upbringings of many students. Through her writing, Athena explores her mixed race identity, the virgin/whore dichotomy, social justice and is writing a short story collection documenting her immigrant families’ stories. Currently studying Political Theory at Columbia University, she is also a part of the Eric Holder Initiative, a course track that focuses on a multifaceted approach social justice, including artistic justice, and is a board member on First-Generation Low-Income Partnerships, a student organization that addressed food insecurity on college campuses nationwide. Athena’s artistic mantra is, “The personal is political and all poetry is personal.”
David Trinidad’s most recent book of poems is Swinging on a Star (Turtle Point Press, 2017). His other books include Notes on a Past Life (BlazeVOX [books], 2016) and Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera (Turtle Point, 2013). Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith, which he edited, is forthcoming from Turtle Point in 2019. Trinidad lives in Chicago, where he teaches at Columbia College.
Leonard Morrison is a writer living in Chicago. He is the recipient of the 2018 Eileen Lannan Poetry Prize. His work is concerned with sound and rhythm and has been historically classified as postmodern lyric.