018 – Moving Clouds with Ingrid Rojas Contreras

We’re moving clouds with Ingrid Rojas Contreras.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras is an award-winning author who was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, Guernica, and Huffington Post, among others. She is the book columnist for KQED, the Bay Area's NPR affiliate.

We’ll start with a clip of from Rojas Contreras’ performance at City of Asylum in July 2019, then we’ll transition to an interview we just did with Ingrid, some conversation, and finally we’ll get to what we’re reading and some thoughts for the road. We'll be talking spiritualism, writing and identity, as well as that time Adriana tried to buy some contraband and ended up with Something Special.

Charla Cultural

Charla Cultural is a little chat about culture, focusing on performances and interviews with women, LGBTQIA, BIPOC and other marginalized artists working in literature, music, and the arts. Charla Cultural is sponsored by Aster(ix) Journal and City of Asylum, and it’s hosted by Karla Lamb and Adriana E. Ramírez.

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Recent Posts

  • 018 – Moving Clouds with Ingrid Rojas Contreras

    We’re moving clouds with Ingrid Rojas Contreras.

    Ingrid Rojas Contreras is an award-winning author who was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, Guernica, and Huffington Post, among others. She is the book columnist for KQED, the Bay Area's NPR affiliate.

    We’ll start with a clip of from Rojas Contreras’ performance at City of Asylum in July 2019, then we’ll transition to an interview we just did with Ingrid, some conversation, and finally we’ll get to what we’re reading and some thoughts for the road. We'll be talking spiritualism, writing and identity, as well as that time Adriana tried to buy some contraband and ended up with Something Special.

  • 017 – Looking Back at Jazz Poetry

    We’re LOOKING BACK at Jazz Poetry.

    Jazz Poetry has celebrated the fusion of music and language for over 18 years. Musicians and poets are brought together by City of Asylum to experiment, collaborate, connect and to express themselves freely, yielding performances greater than their parts.

    This episode is really special, an opportunity to dig through performances from the City of Asylum archive 2011-2019. Unless you were sitting in the audience at the COA tent, or Alphabet City, at any of these performances, you’ve never heard these before.

  • 016 – Eating Fire with Jose Hernandez Diaz

    We’re eating fire with poet Jose Hernandez Diaz

    Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He holds degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and Antioch University Los Angeles. His work appears in The Best American Nonrequired ReadingGreen Mountains ReviewHuizacheNew Orleans ReviewNorth American ReviewThe ProgressiveWitness, among others. He has served as an editor for Floricanto Press and Lunch Ticket. His manuscript was a finalist for the 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize.

    We'll be talking astrology, Frida Kahlo, and the different definitions of "pocho." 

  • 015 – Digging into the Unknown with Daniel Borzutzky

    We're digging into the unknown with Daniel Borzutzky.

    Daniel Borzutzky is the author of Lake Michigan, finalist for the 2019 Griffin International Poetry Prize; The Performance of Becoming Human, which received the 2016 National Book Award. He teaches in the English and Latin American and Latino Studies Departments at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

    We're talking joy, the love that survives, and how our country became used to massacre.