SCC Celebrates National Poetry Month With Brent Cardenas And Roberto Harrison

04/09/2018

West Burlington, IA -- Southeastern Community College will celebrate April as National Poetry Month by hosting a Visiting Writers Series event on Saturday, April 14, at 8:00 p.m.. Scheduled to read are Brenda Cárdenas and Roberto Harrison, nationally acclaimed and award-winning authors. SCC's Culture on Campus Committee and Di Dante Literature & Writing Club will co-host the event.

SCC English & Creative Writing Instructor and Di Dante Advisor Charles Burm notes, "Members of SCC's Culture on Campus Committee feel it is important to provide our students and the greater community with cultural opportunities that otherwise may be difficult to access. It is our honor and pleasure to bring these distinguished writers to our campus."

The reading will be held in the Little Theatre, Room 333, on SCC's West Burlington campus and will be followed by a brief question and answer session with the authors. All Visiting Writers Series events are free and open to the public, but space is limited. Therefore, guests are encouraged to arrive and be seated by 7:45 p.m. Free refreshments will be provided at the close of the presentation.

Burm is quick in promoting the talent of the guest poets and the cooperative efforts of multiple organizations to make SCC's Visiting Writers Series successful. "Brenda Cárdenas and Roberto Harrison have gathered much praise and have earned many awards for their writing. Their work has been widely published, and they are highly regarded in their field. We are fortunate to have them with us to celebrate National Poetry Month."

Burm continues, "Much credit should go to the Burlington Area Arts Council, the Burlington Fine Arts League, the Society of Great River Poets, the SCC Foundation, and many area businesses and individuals for supporting SCC's Culture on Campus Committee, the Visiting Writers Series, and Di Dante Literature & Writing Club students and projects. Through cooperative institutional and community efforts, we are able to host writers of this caliber."

Brenda Cárdenas is the author of Boomerang and the chapbooks Bread of the Earth / The Last Colors with Roberto Harrison; Achiote Seeds/Semillas de Achiote with Cristina García, Emmy Pérez, and Gabriela Erandi Rico; and From the Tongues of Brick and Stone. She also co-edited Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance and Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Latino Poetics: The Art of Poetry, The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, POETRY, City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness, Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing, the Library of Congress Spotlight on U.S. Hispanic Writers, and The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. Ms. Cárdenas served as the Milwaukee Poet Laureate from 2010-2012, and she teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Roberto Harrison pursued studies in mathematics and computer science as an undergraduate; after a year of graduate work in mathematics at Indiana University in Bloomington, he traveled in the United States, Europe, and North Africa. Mr. Harrison edited the poetry journal Crayon with Andrew Levy from 1997-2008, and he is a former editor of the Bronze Skull Press Chapbook series. In 2008, a show of his drawings and journal entries, entitled Ineffable Isthmus, was featured at the Woodland Pattern Book Center gallery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Mr. Harrison is the author of Os, Counter Daemons, bicycle, culebra, Bridge of the World, Yaviza, and many chapbooks. He currently serves as the 2017-2019 Milwaukee Poet Laureate, and he continues to work in visual art as well. Mr. Harrison lives in Milwaukee with his wife, Brenda Cárdenas.

All Visiting Writers Series events are free and open to the public, but space is limited. Guests are encouraged to arrive and be seated by 7:45 p.m. For more information, contact Charles Burm, cburm@scciowa.edu, (319) 208-5230.

For more news or to learn about Southeastern Community College, visit: https://www.scciowa.edu/rss/news/index.html