Tomorrow night–that is, Thursday, December 9, 2021–at 5pm CST, I’ll be reading my poem “Loyalty Oath: Día de los Muertos, November 2020” as part of an online release for the powerful new collection Gathering: A Women Who Submit Anthology. WWS is a network of women and nonbinary writers supporting each other in shaking up the exclusions of the publishing world. I have poet and literary community builder Viktoria Valenzuela to thank for launching a chapter here in San Antonio, and for forwarding me WWS’s call for creative work written by members amid the multiple traumas of 2020.
I wrote “Loyalty Oath” on the eve of the 2020 election, at the pre-vaccine height of the pandemic, and it was one of those poems that explodes out of you from some other realm. I was deeply honored that the editors of Gathering not only selected it but used it to close out their anthology, and also moved to see it featured on their blog here.
If you’re on Instagram, I want to invite you to gather with us to celebrate and mourn and honor all we’ve been through in the past two years. To view, visit @womenwhosubmit on IG at 9pm CST (it’ll be on yer phone’s mobile IG app, not online via desktop, pretty sure). WWS will be live at that time, featuring earthshattering readings from eight writers included in the anthology.
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UPDATE: If you missed the live event, here’s the recording of my performance. Thanks to Sakae Manning for hosting and organizing!