We Say Our Own Names: West Coast Poets of Color

Sara Borjas is a Xicanx pocha and a Fresno poet. Her debut collection of poetry, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff was published by Noemi Press in 2019. She co-hosts and produces “The Lovesick Poetry Podcast” — a west coast poetry podcast launching in 2019, alongside IRL cousin and award-winning poet, Joseph Rios. Sara is a 2017 CantoMundo Fellow, a 2016 Postgraduate Writers Conference Fellow at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and a 2013 Community of Writers Workshop at Squaw Valley Fellow. She is the recipient of the 2014 Blue Mesa Poetry Prize and a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. She lives in Los Angeles but stays rooted in Fresno.

Rocío Carlos (she/they) is a poet from Los Ángeles. Her books include (the other house), Attendanceand A Universal History of infamy: Those of This America. Her poems have appeared in Chaparral, Angel City Review, The Spiral Orb and Cultural Weekly. She was selected as a 2003 Pen Center“Emerging Voices” fellow.

Chiwan Choi is the author of 3 books of poetry, The Flood (Tía Chucha Press, 2010), Abductions (Writ Large Press, 2012), and The Yellow House (CCM, 2017). He wrote, presented, and destroyed the novel Ghostmaker throughout the course of 2015. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including The New York Times Magazine, ONTHEBUS, Esquire.com, and The Nervous Breakdown. Chiwan is a partner at Writ Large Press, a Los Angeles based indie publisher, focused on using literary arts to resist, disrupt, and transgress. Chiwan was born in Seoul, Korea, spent his early childhood in Asunción, Paraguay, and now splits his time between Pittsburgh and Los Angeles.

Malcolm Friend is a poet originally from the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle, WA. 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 Afrocarribean poetry collective.