ARTIFACT & ACHIOTE PRESS

ARTIFACT and ACHIOTE PRESS present...

Scott INGUITO

JTH (Johnny HERNANDEZ)

Margaret RHEE

françois LUONG

Saturday, January 24, 2009
7PM Doors/7:30 Reading

@ Oakland Art Gallery
Frank Ogawa Plaza
199 Kahn's Alley
Oakland Ca 94612

Directions here.

$5 suggested donation

About Achiote Press:

Achiote: a shrub or small tree indigenous to Central and South America. Introduced to the Pacific and Asia by the Spanish in the 17th century, Achiote now has firm transnational roots. Achiote produces pink flowers and red spiny seed pods. Peoples have used the seeds as a dye for clothing, arts and crafts, as body paint in times of war and celebration, as spice and coloring for food. Other parts of the Achiote tree have been used to make various medicinal remedies for sunstroke, burns, fever, sore throat, blood disease, eye and ear infections, and hypertension. Achiote has also been used as an aphrodisiac. We named our press after the Achiote tree because we believe poetry has the very same powers to enrich our surroundings, inspire our passions, enhance our senses, and heal our wounds.

To us, Achiote represents the unrepresentable, transnational, migratory, and adaptive. Achiote Press asks what it means to bear witness, to use adaptation as resistance, to cross borders, to map ourselves onto a dislocated world, to speak in exile, and to suffer diasporic hunger.

Achiote Press was founded in 2006. Every season, we publish two chapbooks: a single-author chapbook and a chap-journal featuring poetry, prose, essay, or translation by authors from diverse cultural and aesthetic backgrounds. In addition, we publish special project chapbooks, including chap-anthologies and collaborative work.

BIOS

Scott Inguito lives in San Francisco, teaches writing in San Jose, and paints in his garage. His most recent writing project, PANDAFUCK, is inspired by the pointless, the ill-tuned yet well-intentioned, the black and white of it all. You can find his paintings at scottinguito.com.

Originally from Strasbourg, France, françois luong currently lives in San Francisco. Other work of his has appeared or is forthcoming in Cannibal, Parthenon West Review, New American Writing, and elsewhere. He is also working on a translation into English of chutes, essais, trafics by Rémi Froger and into French wide slumber for lepidopterists by a.rawlings.

JTH (Johnny Hernandez) is a writer who has been born and raised in and around southern California. JTH currently resides in Emeryville and has been the recent recipient of the Academy of American Poets award for 2008. A recent graduate of the University of California at Berkeley in English, JTH is pursuing an MFA degree from Mills College. Achiote Press published his first collection entitled U.

Margaret Rhee is an interdisciplinary writer and artist. Currently she is a doctorate student in the program in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. She has written academic articles on representation, race, and sexuality for Amerasia Journal; the anthology, Crash Course: Reflections on the Film 'Crash' for Critical Dialogues About Race, Power and Privilege; and the journal, Sexuality Research and Social Policy. Previously she worked as writer and editor in Los Angeles for YOLK Magazine, Chopblock.com, and Back Stage. She earned her BA in creative writing at the University of Southern California, and her MA in Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. She is Kundiman fellow, where in the hot, humid, and gorgeous summers of Virginia, she fell in love with poetry.