Celebrating Poetry Month with Ariana Brown & Alan Pelaez Lopez

Poets and teaching artists Ariana Brown and Alan Pelaez Lopez join forces in The Kindred Tour, offering a dual virtual performance with LibroMobile!

Combining Brown's 10-year-long spoken word and teaching career and Pelaez Lopez's 10 years of organizing with Black and queer migrants, this tour creates an interactive experience that addresses the joyful and traumatic conditions of the Black child in the U.S.; imagines Black queer futures outside of state-sanctioned violence; and offers concrete tools to help individuals and their communities rethink how we offer and accept care from one another.

This joint event echoes Brown’s sentiment that “I have never needed heaven, just Black people,” and Pelaez Lopez’s notion that “we create abundance where we thought there was none.”

About the Poets:

Ariana Brown is a queer Black Mexican American poet from the Southside of San Antonio, TX. She is a 2014 national collegiate poetry slam champion and the author of Sana Sana, a poetry chapbook from Game Over Books. Ariana’s work investigates queer Black personhood in Mexican American spaces, queer Black futures, loneliness, and healing. She holds a B.A. in African Diaspora Studies and Mexican American Studies as well as an M.F.A. in Poetry. In 2018, Ariana recorded a digital poetry EP titled LET US BE ENOUGH (available on Bandcamp). She has been writing, performing, and teaching poetry for ten years. Follow her work online at www.arianabrown.com and on Twitter & Instagram @ArianaThePoet.

Alan Pelaez Lopez is an AfroIndigenous poet, installation and adornment artist from the coastal Zapotec community of Oaxaca, México. Much of the artist’s work is invested in thinking with and through theories of fugitivity, language, grief, ancestral memories, and the role of storytelling in migrant households. Pelaez Lopez is the author of Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020), a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award, and to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020).

Learn more about them here:

https://www.ynmecreatives.com/

For more info about the event, email libromobile@gmail.com

IG: @LibroMobile