earth day-ish radio interview

When I got an invitation to appear as a guest on “No Alibis,” a radio program on UC Santa Barbara’s KCSB, I was nervous. I’m not good at extemporaneous speaking, or at least that’s how it feels from the inside. My go-to tactic in public speaking situations is usually to overprepare, which can be exhausting…but this time I didn’t have time or any questions in advance to prepare. So instead I decided to just trust myself (aka winging it). And it was such a great conversation, in large part because hosts Marisela Marquez and Elizabeth Robinson asked such interesting, thoughtful questions–from the beginning of my involvement with environmental justice work in San Antonio to the meaning of “deceleration” to the transition in my own life from poetry to academia to organizing back again to poetry and fiction.

Here’s the whole show. My segment starts at 20:33, but I’ve included the full broadcast because the second segment–an interview with UCSB Global Studies professor Charmaine Chua and UCLA musicologist Shana Redmond on abolition and the Cops Off Campus Coalition–is so critical right now and always.

¡Mega Corazón Rides Again!

Puro silliness. Still, these Whataburger poems shoulda won.

About a year ago, one of the earliest signs for working artists that we were living in a changed world was the almost wholesale cancellation of San Antonio’s usually overflowing calendar of National Poetry Month events. One of the few exceptions was URBAN-15’s Mega Corazón, a marathon broadcast of South Texas spoken word that survived by virtue of its already-online format.

Still, even Mega Corazón had to scramble to figure out how to film readings without bringing poets physically into URBAN-15’s online broadcast studio, and the solution it came up with was to have poets record themselves reading and then stitch these recordings together into a pastiche of nonstop poesis. While rougher around the edges, these little poetry home videos—shot from living rooms and on cell phones—in many ways had a poignancy and intimacy unmatched by the more polished production of previous years.

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