Essentially Poetic: An Essential Voices Monthly Reading Series for Community Building, May 2025
Essentially Poetic Reading Series is back!
Join us as we celebrate four recently published FlowerSong Press poets on Wednesday, May 28, 2025 at 7:00 PM CST on Zoom
Essentially Poetic: An Essential Voices Reading Series Community Building is a curation of poets, artists, essayists, novelists, educators, and everyday individuals whose deemed their voice essential, their work necessary, and their compassion for community building contagious and inspiring. This space is free of judgement and hate, and is a space for writers, readers, and admirers to come together to listen and uplift one another in a creative, poetic, and intentional online space.
Essentially Poetic is dedicated to amplifying essential voices throughout our world. By creating an online environment, we can reach beyond geographical borders and barriers. The essential voice echoes loud and translates intuitively. Join us each month as we come together to celebrate featured readers and artists and listen to their poetic and essential voice.
This month, we are excited to invite you to join us for a celebratory reading with four recently published FlowerSong Press poets who will be reading from their latest collection of work.
Meet our May Essentially Poetic Featured Readers:
Jessica Helen Lopez is the City of Albuquerque Poet Laureate, Emeritus (2014-2016), a NM Humanities Chautauqua Scholar, Rural Women's Collective Fellow at Justice for Migrant Women and the Zia Book Award Recipient for her inaugural poetry collection, Always Messing With them Boys (West End Press). She is also the author of The Blood Poems (University of New Mexico Press), The Language of Bleeding, Provocateur and cunt. bomb.(Swimming With Elephants Publications). An Adjunct Instructor with the University of New Mexico Chicana and Chicano Studies Department, Lopez also teaches at the Native American Community Academy High School, UNM Chicana and Chicano Studies Department and the Santa Fe Institute of American Indian Academy. A California born Chicana, Lopez resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A six-time member of the ABQ Champion Winning Slam Team and two-time champion of the ABQ Women of the World Poetry Slam, Lopez is a member of the Macondo Foundation, an association of socially-engaged writers working to advance creativity, foster generosity, and serve community which was founded in 1995 by Mexican-American writer Sandra Cisneros. Lopez was the John Trudell Featured Activist Poet awarded by the San Bernardino College and is the editor of the photo-poetic anthology, La Palabra: The Word is a Woman and Earthships: A New Mecca Poetry Collection. Her poetry, academic research and book reviews have been published widely both in print and online. She is a single mama, Xingona, Jota, Pocha, and lover of lime paletas and fierce little chihuahuas. Visit her at jessicahelenlopezpoet.wordpress.com.
Abigail Carl-Klassen is a poet, writer, researcher, educator, translator, and activist living in El Paso, Texas, with her husband and two children. She grew up in the oil fields of the Permian Basin alongside Old Colony Mennonite immigrants from Mexico and has worked in education, language services, community development, social science research, and agriculture in a variety of contexts across the U.S. and Latin America. She earned an MFA in Bilingual Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso and her work has been published widely in English and Spanish, appearing in ZYZZYVA, Catapult, Cimarron Review, Guernica, Aster(ix) Huizache, and others. She has published two poetry chapbooks, A’int Country Like You (Digging Press) and Shelter Management (dancing girl press). Recordings of her oral history project, “Rebels, Exiles, and Bridge Builders: Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Campos Menonitas of Chihuahua” can be found on the Darp Stories YouTube channel.
A.M. Hayden is the current Poet Laureate for Sinclair College and award-winning Professor of Humanities, Philosophy, and World Religions. She has received several pedagogy recognitions, including the League for Innovation Teaching Excellence Award (2020), and the Distinguished Faculty Scholars Award (2024). Her debut poetry collection, American Saunter, released December 2024 by FlowerSong Press. Her first chapbook, How to Tie Tobacco, and second full-length collection, Old World Wings: Poems of Europe is forthcoming by Wild Ink Publishing in 2025. A Pushcart Prize Nominee and River Heron Review Editors' Choice Winner, she lives on a windy little farm with her family and many rescues including their blind, three-legged wonder pup, Vinny Valentine. Read more of her work at windychickenpoet.com and connect with her on the socials @windychickenpoet.
Poet-dramatist Cindy Williams Gutiérrez was awarded the 2018 Willow Books Editor’s Choice Poetry Selection and a 2016 Oregon Literary Fellowship for Inlay with Nacre: The Names of Forgotten Women. She was selected by Poets & Writers Magazine as a 2014 Notable Debut Poet for the small claim of bones, which placed second in the 2015 International Latino Book Awards. Cindy received the 2017 Oregon Book Award for Drama for Words That Burn. In 2022, she co-produced her choreopoem, In the Name of Forgotten Women, which was acclaimed by Portland’s Willamette Week as “a vibrant call for action.”
Cindy has taught poetry to youth in every grade from K-12 in Washington and Oregon and is currently a teaching artist at Paschal Sherman Indian School on the Colville Reservation. She is cofounder of El Grupo de ‘08, a Northwest collaborative-artists’ salon; Los Porteños, Portland’s Latinx writers’ collective; and the Confluence Poets in Washington State’s Methow Valley. Along with an MBA and an MA in International Studies from the University of Pennsylvania’s Lauder Institute, Cindy earned an MFA from the University of Southern Maine Stonecoast Program with concentrations in Mesoamerican poetics and creative collaboration.
Cindy is inspired by the silent and silenced voices of history, herstory and her own story. She dreams of the day when history will expand into our story.
