ADELANTE Speaker Series

We are thrilled to invite you to the launch of the ADELANTE Speaker Series: Places, Poetics, and Practices of Care—a powerful conversation exploring how place-based knowledge, cultural expressions, and community practices foster resilience and well-being in the Borderlands and beyond.

 

Eva Maria Sierra, Education and Outreach Assistant for the UA Poetry Center, will present Poetry is Education: Strengthening Communities Through Stories and Narratives. This event will feature a poetry reading, discussion, and mini-workshop exploring poetry as a powerful tool for education. Together, we’ll examine the role of storytelling in building stronger communities, envision what a more connected community looks like, and create a collaborative poem.

Eva Maria Sierra is a people’s poet. With a sensibility for the intersection between nature, the border, and the lessons of the barrio, they remind us that to speak to the land is to speak to familia, to our elders, and to our community. In the poem “The Stories of the Wren” Sierra  channels the birds, writing, “We’ve seen from here / a path to heaven / that is lit by veladoras, / lined with coronas of fresh flowers, / flowing with rivers of poured out 40’s— / it is unlike anything else.” 
 

Laura Villareal (poet, book critic, and writer for Letras Latinas Blog) will present Foraging for Metaphor: What We Can Learn from Native Plants and Small Acts of Care. This event will feature a poetry reading and lecture that will explore locating metaphor in our environment and how our attention can cultivate a practice of care in the places we call home. 

In the poem “Underneath the Crabgrass”, Laura Villareal listens for stories hidden at the roots, uncovering untold parts of her family history. She writes, “The blades are dream-like, / a green of another world, & plush too. / Underneath the crabgrass / are my mother’s annual efforts / to make earth into a garden.” Using “memory as a dowsing rod” Villareal unearths familial and personal truths with daring curiosity.

We hope you’ll join us for these discussions on how storytelling, activism, and education cultivate spaces of care and belonging.

RSVP for April 17

RSVP for April 18