My Calendar

On December 2 at 1:30 pm at the Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts, please join Inlandia as we welcome Pittsburgh poet and winner of the 2017 Hillary Gravendyk Prize, Malcolm Friend, in a celebratory reading and launch of his prize-winning poetry collection, Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple. Friend will read alongside three other poets: Hillary Gravendyk Prize finalists Sara Borjas and Micah Chatterton, and Rachelle Cruz, winner of the 2016 Hillary Gravendyk Prize and 2018 American Book Award.

Malcolm Friend is a poet originally from the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. 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), winner of the 2017 Hillary Gravendyk Prize. He has received awards and fellowships from organizations including CantoMundo, VONA/Voices of Our Nations, the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics, Backbone Press, and the University of Memphis.

Sara Borjas is a Chicana, a pocha, and a Fresno poet. Her debut collection of poetry, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff is forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2019. She 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 teaches Creative Writing at UC Riverside and lives in Los Angeles but stays rooted in Fresno.

Micah Chatterton writes, edits, teaches and tends library at various locations in the Inland Empire, where he grew up. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including B O D Y, Sixfold, Ruminate, Tupelo Quarterly, LETTERS, and Slice. His work is also featured in Best New Poets 2013 (University of Virginia Press, 2013), The Cancer Poetry Project 2 (Thasora Books, 2013) and The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss (Fast Foreword, 2014).

Rachelle Cruz is from Hayward, California. She is the author of God’s Will for Monsters, which won the 2016 Hillary Gravendyk Regional Poetry Prize (Inlandia, 2017) and an American Book Award. She is also the author of Self-Portrait as Rumor and Blood (Dancing Girl Press, 2012), and co-editor with Melissa Sipin of Kuwento: Lost Things, an anthology of Philippine Myths (Carayan Press, 2015). An Emerging Voices Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow and a VONA writer, she lives, writes and teaches in Southern California.