Kuwentuhan (Talkstory): Javier O. Huerta, Lehua M. Taitano, Angela Narciso Torres
Kuwentuhan (Talkstory)
Kuwentuhan (Talkstory) takes the Tagalog term, a phoneticized form adapted through the colonial Spanish, as its title, proposition, and starting point. Kuwentuhan (“necessary step toward big talk,” by one definition) is orally based, informal in nature, usually spontaneous, and is always an opportunity for people to converge and share. It occurs in all kinds of social spaces as talkstory circle.
The project’s aim is to open up precisely the kind of human space that barely exists in our technological and “globalized” culture, by allowing a select group of American poets out of widely disparate and polyglot cultural and geographic backgrounds to actually talk face to face, sharing stories, poetry and conversations among themselves and with audiences. They are interested in work that originates from a communal basis, and in shaping a project that encourages collective creation, by putting into action mechanisms for creating “live” person-to-person exchange between and among artists and audiences.
Kuwentuhan (Talkstory) is a project of The Poetry Center and Barbara Jane Reyes, supported by the Creative Work Fund.
Javier O. Huerta
Javier O. Huerta is the author of American Copia (Arte Publico 2012) and Some Clarifications y otros poemas (Arte Publico 2007), which received the UC Irvine Chicano/Latino Literary Prize. He received his Master of Fine Arts in creative witing from University of Texas, El Paso.
Lehua M. Taitano
Lehua M. Taitano is a queer Chamoru poet, writer, and artist from Yigo, Guahån (Guam). She serves as community outreach director on the executive board of RASA, which produces the Thinking Its Presence Literary and Arts Conference. She is the author of the poetry collection A Bell Made of Stones (TinFish Press) and the chapbook of short fiction, appalachiapacific, which won the 2010 Merriam-Frontier Award. Her newest chapbook of poetry, Sonoma, will be published via Dropleaf Press this year.
Angela Narciso Torres
Angela Narciso Torres’ first book of poetry, Blood Orange, won the Willow Books Literature Award for Poetry and was published by Willow Books/Aquarius Press. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Kyoto Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Colorado Review and Drunken Boat. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she resides in Chicago, where she teaches poetry workshops and serves as a senior poetry editor for RHINO, a publicity coordinator for Woman Made Gallery Literary Events and a reader for New England Review.