CIRC Presents: Alan Pelaez Lopez, an AfroIndigenous Poet

Join us for a virtual poetry performance and Q&A on Thursday, May 20th from 7 to 8pm. Admission is $5 and will go towards supporting the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, a non profit organization that aims to improve the lives of immigrants and refugees by making Colorado a more welcoming, immigrant-friendly state.

Alan Pelaez Lopez is a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears in Best New Poets 2019 and Best American Experimental Writing 2020. They are also an installation and adornment artist, an organizer with Black and queer migrants, and comes from the coastal Zapotec community of Oaxaca, México.

Alan's work is invested in thinking with and through fugitivity, language, grief, ancestral memories, and the role of storytelling in migrant households. Their Kindred Tour focuses on what might it mean to imagine migration outside the context of labor and borders? How can poetry unsettle the project of settler-colonialism so that a migrant future is not only imaginable, but possible? In this reading Alan Pelaez Lopez will share published and unpublished work about growing up undocumented in the United States, Black embodiments, and their insistence on the imagination as a tool of liberation.

Can't make it on Thursday? This event will be recorded and the link will be sent afterwards.