Check out International Poetry Festival in McAllen this weekend
The 17th annual Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival kicked off Thursday evening at the McAllen Chamber of Commerce with the launching of their regular poetry anthology, Boundless.
The evening included readings from those published in the collection, including from your humble servant, and announcing the reappointment of Daniel Garcia Ordaz as McAllen’s Poet Laureate for a second year in a row.
Flowersong Press publisher and prolific Chicano poet, Edward Vidaurre, guided the ceremony. Vidaurre, who moved to the Valley from Los Angeles, was McAllen Poet Laureate in 2019. He and La Joya, Texas-based, Erika Elisa Garza Tamez, selected and edited the poems in the anthology. It’s over 132 pages long and includes over 80 writers from around the globe, as far away as China.
RGVIPF 2024 continues today, April 26, with a touring of the anthology’s poets to public schools around the region, connecting with students interested in possibly pursuing careers and fields of study in poetry and in the arts.
A college and university reading will be hosted at 6:30 p.m. at Common Space in McAllen, followed by a slam poetry open mic for all ages, which will be M.C.’d by Garcia-Ordaz.
Saturday will be filled with clinics and workshops on various cultural and local topics. See full schedule here. Saturday evening will headline with a dinner for poets who registered for the conference, followed by a reading that’ll be open to the public, which will include some live music from this author.
The festival will conclude Sunday with a road trip to Gloria Anzaldua’s gravesite in Hargill, Texas, where there’ll be a reading in her honor.
Here’s my poem, "Context”, which was written as a meditation on how the word has become politicized, from the multiple perspectives who employ it:
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