Dallas Poets Book Launch

Overview

Deep Vellum presents an evening celebrating the release of three poetry chapbooks by Edyka Chilomé, Fatima-Ayan Malika Hirsi, and Mike Soto. The evening will feature the presentation of these brand-new poetic works made available for the first time by three of the most talented, important, and innovative writers in the Dallas literary community, celebrated and showcased via a collaborative reading and discussion. Quantities of the chapbooks will be limited; come early, stay late, and celebrate #LiteraryDallas!
The three local writers to be featured are all residents of the city of Dallas, and are representative of a broadly diverse swathe of Dallas’s population—writing in three differing, yet all amazing, poetic traditions—that make our city such an inspiring place to live, read, and write:
• Edyka Chilomé is a literary arts activist, performer, and cultural worker currently based in Dallas. She is a queer child of Salvadorean and Mexican migrant activists, and was raised in social justice movements grounded in the tradition of spiritual activism. Edyka holds a BA in social and political philosophy with an emphasis on social justice from Loyola University Chicago, and an MA in Multicultural Women’s Studies from Texas Women’s University where her research focused on the decolonial power of spiritual [art]ivism. In 2017 Edyka was named top 25 most influential artists in DFW by Artist Uprising Magazine. Her play “Where Earth Meets the Sky,” produced by Cara Mia Theatre Company, was praised as 2018’s top Latinx Theatre Production in the DFW by Theater Jones Review. In the summer of 2018 Edyka was apart of Sandra Cisnero’s Macondo Writers Workshop and is currently a 2018-2019 Intercultural Leadership Institute Fellow.
• Fatima-Ayan Malika Hirsi is the founder of Dark Moon Poetry & Arts, a monthly series spotlighting the creative feminine and non-binary POC energies of North Texas. She can often be found on sidewalks using her typewriter to birth poems for strangers or in classrooms unlocking the imaginations of children. She has been published in The Texas Observer, Entropy, The Boiler, Anthropology Now!, and elsewhere. Her work has been featured by WFAA, KERA, the Dallas Morning News, and others. Her first chapbook, Moon Woman, was published by Thoughtcrime Press in June 2018.
• Mike Soto is a first generation Mexican-American writer raised in East Dallas and in a small town in Michoacán, who received his MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. His debut chapbook, Beyond the Shadow’s Ink was published by Jeanne Duval Editions in 2010. His debut book-length work of poetry, A Grave is Given Supper, will be published by Deep Vellum in summer 2020.

This chapbook publication and reading presentation is brought to you by the City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs through a Cultural Vitality Project grant. The project was pitched to the OCA as the “Central Track Writers Project,” which takes its name and inspiration from the rich cultural history of Dallas: in the late 1800s, the Central Track rail lines separated Deep Ellum from the rest of Dallas (around where I-345 is today). At that time, uncommon diversity among business owners in Deep Ellum created a unique social climate where cultural interaction took place in the fields of music, visual art, theater, and literature. Deep Vellum has tried to carry on the legacy of our neighborhood’s vibrant cultural history since our inception (even incorporating a pun on the neighborhood into our own name!), and seeks to do the same with the Central Track Writers Project, by creating opportunities for writers within our own city limits, harnessing the creative power of Deep Ellum’s present cultural capital and status as an urban core arts destination, while as a platform for individual literary artists and ideas to share their vision with the world, displaying to the city of Dallas and the world that literature is art, and that Dallas literature is an art to be celebrated, read, and shared.