LUNADA

Chibbi Orduña is a Mexican-born, Texas-raised queer poet and actor. He is the founder of Laredo BorderSlam, a founding member of Write About Now, and has self-published two books. He has toured across the country performing his poetry, and his work has appeared in OutSmart Magazine, The Latino Book Review Magazine 2020, and has been featured online on Are Mitu, George Takei, SlamFind, Poetry Slam Inc, Button Poetry, and Write About Now.

Manuela Arciniegas is an Afro-Dominican drummer, healer priestess, dollmaker, and social justice warrior. She writes songs that are spirit messages from her ancestors, and invitations into the collective consciousness for the world. Mother of 4, funder, teaching artist, ethnomusicologist in the making, she has performed with the all-women’s band she founded Legacy Women, everywhere from Lincoln Center to south Bronx community gardens. Music is medicine and life, and the words of aché, fueled by fire and cooled by the river —run through her. 

Marga Gomez has read at Lunada twice in San Francisco and is honored to be part of this profound experience once more, now more than ever. Marga is the writer and performer of thirteen solo plays, which have been produced everywhere including Borderlands in Tucson. These days she’s bringing them all online. She will premiere her latest show “Spanking Machine” as a commissioned work by Dixon Place NYC July 16th thru July 25th. Her acting credits include theatre roles: Campo Santos San Francisco production of  “Translating Selena” (January 2020) Off-Broadway Ars Nova production of “Dr. Rides American Beach House” (November 2019) television: “Sense8” (Netflix) and film: “Sphere” (Warner Brothers.)

Jesús I. Valles is a queer Mexican immigrant, educator, storyteller, and performer based in Austin, Texas, originally from Cd. Juarez, Mexico.  Jesús is a recipient of the 2018 Undocupoets Fellowship, a fellow of The Poetry Foundation and Crescendo Literary’s 2018 Poetry Incubator, runner-up in the 2017 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest, and a finalist of the 2016 Write Bloody Poetry Contest. Their work has been published in The Shade Journal, The Texas Review, and The New Republic (forthcoming). Jesús currently teaches social and emotional learning to high school students, focusing on those recently arrived in the U.S.

Born in the South Bronx and raised in the Throgs Neck Housing Projects, Tony Medina is a poet, graphic novelist, editor, biographer, and author of award-winning books for children and young adults. A two-time winner of the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People (DeShawn Days and I and I, Bob Marley), Medina is the author/editor of twenty-one books for adults and young readers, the most recent of which are I and I, Bob Marley (2009),My Old Man Was Always on the Lam (2010), finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, Broke on Ice (2011), An Onion of Wars(2012), The President Looks Like Me & Other Poems (2013) and Broke Baroque (2013),finalist for the Julie Suk Book Award. He has received the Langston Hughes Society Award; the first African Voices Literary Award; and was nominated for Pushcart Prizes for his poems, “Broke Baroque” and “From the Crushed Voice Box of Freddie Gray.” Medina, whose poetry and prose appears in over 100 anthologies and literary journals, is the first Professor of Creative Writing at Howard University. His latest book is the poetry collection, Death, with Occasional Smiling(Indolent Books, 2020).