VIDEO + AUDIO Mazza Writer in Residence Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta with special guest Daisy Zamora, reading and in conversation

Full-program video: Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta and Daisy Zamora: October 4, 2018
Video highlight clips: Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta reads a new poem, beginning "Having found yourself escalated by yourself..." | Daisy Zamora reads "Ser Mujer / To Be a Woman," in Spanish then in English translation by George Evans

For the first of two evenings as Mazza Writer in Residence for Fall 2018, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta is joined by celebrated Nicaraguan poet—and SF State faculty member in Latina/Latino Studies—Daisy Zamora, with the two poets reading from their works, followed by a conversation between them and in response to their audience. Supported by the Sam Mazza Foundation, this event is free and open to the public. 

A Nicaraguan Californian via Mexico raised both in Huntington Park and Highland Park neighborhoods of Los Angeles, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta lives in a rent controlled apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco. An artist, writer, reproductive justice activist, patient advocate, and lapsed full spectrum doula who supports themself through working at a neighborhood cafe and cleaning houses, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta’s work attempts, as fellow poet Lauren Levin writes, to “include direct revolutionary action, up to and including revolutionary violence, as part of a continuum of care, and their use of this redefinition of care-work to rethink gendered paradigms.” Their first book, The Easy Body, was published by Oakland queer art & publishing collective Timeless, Infinite Light in 2017. Photo: Dickie Bahto.

Daisy Zamora is one of the most prominent figures in contemporary Latin American poetry.  Her work is known for its uncompromising voice and wide-ranging subject matter that explores and expresses the realities of  everyday life while encompassing human rights, politics, revolution, feminist issues, literature, art, history, and culture.  During Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolution she was a combatant for the FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front), and during the final 1979 Sandinista offensive became the voice and program director for clandestine Radio Sandino.  After the triumph of the revolution, she was appointed Vice Minister of Culture for the new government. She worked with fellow poet and mentor Ernesto Cardenal, Minister of Culture to create and implement numerous programs that successfully revitalized the war‑damaged cultural life of Nicaragua, including a popular, highly successful national literacy program that brought books and reading, poetry, and visual arts to even the remotest areas of the country.

Author of numerous books of poetry in Spanish, as well as a collection of political essays, she also edited the first comprehensive anthology of Nicaraguan women poets published in Latin America.  Her latest poetry collection, La violenta espuma, was published in Madrid by renowned Spanish poetry publisher Visor in late December 2017.  Also recently, she was featured in director Jenny Murray’s award winning documentary ¡Las Sandinistas!, soon to be aired on PBS. Among her poetry books in English, The Violent Foam: New & Selected Poems, a bilingual collections, was published by Curbstone Press.  Life for Each, was published in England by Katabasis in 1994;  an earlier collection, Riverbed of Memory, was published by City Lights Books in 1992, and Clean Slate by Curbstone Press in 1993.

A political activist and advocate for women's rights throughout her life, for the last several years she has taught poetry workshops at a number of universities and colleges, and has been a lecturer of Latin American culture and literature for the Latin American & Latino Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of San Francisco, and currently at San Francisco State University. She resides in Managua and San Francisco, where she lives with her husband, U.S. poet and writer George Evans. Photo: Frank Pineda.