jo reyes-boitel
jo reyes-boitel is a poet, essayist, and playwright. Somehow born in Minnesota, her family calls Texas, Florida, Mexico, and/or Cuba home.
Recent and forthcoming publications include Scalawag Journal, Windward Review, La Voz de Esperanza, Chachalaca Review, Borderlands, The Americas Review, and Your Impossible Voice.
A recent working performance art piece called this body was presented as part of W-I-P (Work in Progress) at Jump-Start Performance Company and Palo Alto Theater. Previously, her directorial and writing debut of Nahual, a one-woman play, was presented at Palo Alto Community College in celebration of World Theater Day.
jo was the recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award, granted by Sandra Cisneros, a long time ago.
You can find jo leading community-based writing workshops or co-curating This City Is A Poem, which highlights local and regional poets and provides writing prompts daily as part of National Poetry Month. She will be teaching “Notes to Gilgamesh: Crafting a Novel in Verse” this November at Gemini Ink.
Her new book, Michael + Josephine, a novel in verse, reimagines St. Michael the Archangel as a queer woman who begins a love relationship with Josephine, a disaster relief worker.
jrboitel@yahoo.com
Michael + Josephine is an unexpected love story between St. Michael the Archangel reimagined as a queer woman, and Josephine, a multiethnic Latina who works as a disaster relief worker. Both have busy, full lives helping the world around them. Too busy for a relationship, they contend. Still, they are drawn together at a moment when crises around the world are at an all-time high. In navigating a new kind of love, both solidify the importance of personal and community connection.
"Michael + Josephine is the story of what every great love is—the clash of the everyday and the divine, the push and pull of what our lives demand and what our hearts long for, the hurt of everything we fight for and what we do not fight hard enough for. In these poems, jo reyes-boitel wields a pen that is feather light and scalpel sharp to dissect love, cauterize memory, and examine the unknowable."—ire’ne lara silva, author of Blood Sugar Canto and Cuicacalli/House of Song
"Jo’s content and poetic craft played like a jazz quartet between my ears - tender, reckless and delicious."—Anel I. Flores, author of Empanada, a Lesbiana Story en Probaditas
"Surrender to the considerable enchantments of Jo Reyes-Boitel’s magical book, Michael + Josephine: a novel in verse. Inhabit this tale of a complex relationship told in language that is lush, aggrieved, ecstatic, and simple. In poems that are at once visionary and every day, Reyes-Boitel steadfastly refuses to separate divinity from reality. She revels in both instead."—Jim LaVilla-Havelin, author of West, poems of a place