MK Chavez and Heather June Gibbons

MK Chavez

Oakland-based Latinx writer MK Chavez is the author of several chapbooks including Mothermorphosis and Dear Animal, both published by Nomadic Press. Chavez is co-founder/curator of the reading series Lyrics and Dirges and co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival. Her poem “The New Whitehouse, Finding Myself In The Ruins” was selected by Eileen Myles for the 2017 Cosmonauts Avenue Poetry Award. Chavez is a co-founder/curator of the reading series Lyrics and Dirges, a fellow with CantoMundo, and guest curator of the reading series at UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive this fall.

Heather June Gibbons

Heather June Gibbons was born in Utah and grew up on an island in Washington. Her poetry collection Her Mouth as Souvenir (University of Utah Press) won the 2017 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Sore Songs (Dancing Girl Press), and Flyover (Q Avenue Press). Her poems have appeared widely in literary journals including Blackbird, Boston Review, Drunken Boat, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, jubilat, New American Writing and West Branch.

Gibbons received her Master of Fine Arts in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she held a Callen Graduate Scholarship. She has won a full fellowship residency from the Vermont Studio Center, the Pavel Strut Poetry Fellowship from the Prague Summer Program, Agha Shahid Ali Scholarship from the Fine Arts Work Center and Harold Taylor Prize from the Academy of American Poets.