Mission Poetry Series Spring Reading

MISSION POETRY SERIES WRAPS UP ITS 13TH SEASON AT THE SANTA BARBARA PUBLIC LIBRARY

The 13^th  season of the Mission Poetry Series closes with an  in-person reading on Saturday, May 7, 2022, at 1 p.m. in partnership with the Santa Barbara Public Library.

Wind, Water, Stone: Three Poets in Spring features three award-winning authors: Nicholas Reiner, Crystal AC Salas, and Bruce Willard. The title of the event is taken from the poem “Viento, agua, piedra,” by the Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz. This in-person reading is held at the Santa Barbara Public Library in the Faulkner Gallery and is free and open to the public. The event offers complimentary broadsides, poets’ books for sale, and the chance to meet and chat with our featured poets. 

The reading launches the inaugural bilingual poetry chapbooks of the Alta California Chapbook Prize, a collaboration between Santa Barbara Poet Laureate and Mission Poetry Series curator Emma Trelles and Gunpowder Press. The prize is open to emerging and established Latina/o/x  poets in California writing in English or Spanish.

NICHOLAS REINER is an American poet of Mexican heritage. His debut poetry chapbook Levitations is co-winner of the inaugural Alta California Chapbook Prize, available in a bilingual edition from Gunpowder Press. His poems appear in Spillway, Western Humanities Review, Zócalo Public Square, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is a sports writer, educator, and communications professional, with writing published in ESPN.com and The Orange County Register. Formerly a lecturer in writing at UC Irvine, he has taught writing in high schools, middle and elementary schools, and juvenile halls. He is Director of Communications at the Anti-Recidivism Coalition (ARC), where he lifts up the voices of currently and formerly incarcerated people and edits a quarterly newsletter that reaches tens of thousands of incarcerated people in California prisons. Nicholas holds degrees in English from Stanford University and University of California, Irvine, where he completed an MFA in poetry. He is a chess expert, a title conferred by the US Chess Federation,  and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two daughters. 

CRYSTAL AC SALAS is a Xicanx poet, essayist, educator, and community organizer. Her chapbook Grief Logic is the co-winner of the inaugural Alta California Chapbook Prize, available in a bilingual edition from Gunpowder Press. Her work appears in Northwest Review, [PANK] Magazine, World Literature Today, Acentos Review, and others. She is a founding member of the BreakBread Literacy Project, which works to elevate the voices of young creatives under 25, and she serves as poetry editor for BreakBread Magazine. She is a graduate of University of California, Riverside’s MFA program, where she also provided arts and storytelling outreach as a Gluck fellow and Along the Chaparral fellow. She has worked as a high school English teacher and youth slam poetry coach and has received a California Arts Council Established Individual Artist Fellowship, a grant that showcases “the centrality of artists’ leadership in generating social impact and the evolution of our traditional and contemporary cultures” (CAC). She lives in Los Angeles where she writes about the city’s landscapes of grief and remembrance as mapped on her family. She is working on two different manuscripts: a full-length poetry collection and a memoir. Her favorite poets are Serafin and Clarita Salas. For more, visit www.crystalacsalas.com 

BRUCE WILLARD is the author of three  collections of poems: Holding Ground (2013), Violent Blues (2016), and In Light of Stars (2021), all published by Four Way Books. His poems appear in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cortland Review, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Poet Lore, and other journals, as well as on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac and last fall in the Poetry Foundation’s American Life In Poetry, curated by Kwame Dawes. He is a graduate of Middlebury College with a BA in American Literature and an MFA from Bennington College’s Writing Seminars program. In addition to his work as a poet, Willard oversees a couple of direct-to-consumer clothing businesses, including 32 Bar Blues, which he founded and is based in Santa Barbara. He also lives in Maine and Colorado.

The Mission Poetry Series is curated by Latina poet and educator Emma Trelles, the current Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara and the author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize.

To learn more about the series, visit us at facebook.com/missionpoetryseries