March Poetrio is lined up for you, how exciting!

Join us for our monthly poetry event featuring three poets. This month, we welcomeJesús Sepúlveda, Gianna Russo, Aditi Machado. Click here to RSVP for this event. On the day of the event, we will send a reminder email with the link required to attend.

Like most of our events, this event is free. If you decide to attend and to purchase the authors’ books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you! 

Espejo de Los Detalles/Mirror of Details is the latest poetry collection of Chilean poet Jesús Sepúlveda. Divided in four parts, the collection is configured around themes recurrent in Sepúlveda’s poetry: a past marked by the Chilean dictatorship and political repression; the crisis of civilization and ecological urgency; psychonautic exploration through ayahuasca ceremonies; and the sensorial emancipation of the body. This book is also the exploratory journey of an anarchic and rebellious subjectivity that goes from urban experience, represented by iconic cities like New York and Paris, toward the Amazon jungle. It is, indeed, a voyage of liberation that ends with the eyes of the ego gazing upon its own delusion.

Jesús Sepúlveda is the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays, including his green anarchist manifesto The Garden of Peculiarities (2002) and his book on Latin American poetry Poets on the Edge (2016).  His poems were collected in Poemas de un bárbaro in Santiago de Chile in 2013, Wirikuta, a chapbook published for the International Poetry Festival of Puerto Rico in 2019, and the e-book É um Rio que Perdeu a sua Luz, a selection of his poetry translated into Portuguese. His collection Hotel Marconi (1998) was made into a film in Chile in 2009. Sepúlveda’s work has been translated from Spanish into twelve languages and published in more than twenty countries, leading him to participate in many poetry festivals and readings throughout the world. The Sylt Foundation sponsored him to be a writer-in-residence in South Africa in 2016 and Germany in 2018, and an invited poet in Cambodia in 2017.  In 2019 the Instituto de Cultura Oregoniana awarded him First Prize for Poetry in Spanish in the state of Oregon. His other collections include Lugar de origen (Santiago de Chile, 1987), Correo negro (Buenos Aires, 2001), Escrivania (Mexico, 2003), Antiegótico (Viña del Mar, 2013), and Secoya (New York, 2015). Espejo de los detalles [Mirror of Details] is his latest collection published simultaneously in a bilingual edition in the USA and in Spanish in Chile in 2020. Sepúlveda holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and teaches at the University of Oregon.  His work can be read at poetajesussepulveda.com

The candid poems in Gianna Russo’s One House Down are grounded in experiences of ambivalence and oneness, not unlike those we sometimes find in true love. Russo ruminates on the past and scrutinizes the present in her hometown of Tampa with honest affection, concern, anger, and delight. She asks an essential question: How can we treasure a place whose history and values have sometimes supported injustice? And if those wrongs are still evident today—then what? With family roots in Tampa that go back over a century, Russo skillfully pursues an answer in these inventive, surprising poems.

Gianna Russo is currently serving as the inaugural Wordsmith of The City of Tampa. She is the author of the poetry collections, One House Down (Madville Publishing, 2019); Moonflower, winner of a Florida Book Award; and two chapbooks, Blue Slumber and The Companion of Joy. She has published poems in Green Mountains Review, Negative Capability, Crab Orchard Review, Apalachee Review, The Sun, Poet Lore, saw palm, The MacGuffin, Florida Review, Tampa Review, Ekphrasis, Florida Humanities Council Forum, Karamu, The Bloomsbury Review, and Calyx, among others. Founding editor of YellowJacket Press, she was named Creative Loafing’s Best of the Bay Local Poet in 2017. She holds an MFA in Poetry from The University of Tampa. Gianna is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University, where she teaches in both the undergraduate and graduate programs. She serves as editor-in-chief of Sandhill Review and director of the Sandhill Writers Retreat. She is Saint Leo’s inaugural Poet-in-Residence for the College of Arts and Sciences and scholarly journal Rebus. She lives in Tampa with her husband Jeff Karon and their cat Gingko. She writes: https://russo15.wordpress.com/

In Emporium, Aditi Machado follows a merchant woman as she travels a twenty-first-century “silk route,” trading her wares while becoming “lost” in un-monetizable reciprocities and the sensory excesses of the marketplace: coins changing hands, the odors of food and sweat, the “noise” of translation and multilingualism. Is this tradeswoman in control of her “destiny”/ business or is she the product of impenetrable global forces? These investigative, itinerant poems interrogate our entanglement in the irresistible threads of language, history, and money.

Aditi Machado is a poet, translator, and essayist. Her second book of poems Emporium (Nightboat, 2020) received the James Laughlin Award. Her other works include the poetry collection Some Beheadings (Nightboat, 2017), an essay pamphlet titledThe End (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020), and a translation from the French of Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia (Action, 2016). Her writing appears in journals like The Chicago Review, Lana Turner, The Rumpus, Volt, and Western Humanities Review, among others. She works as an Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Cincinnati. https://www.aditimachado.com/