Friday, March 28, 1:45–3:00 p.m. PT
Petree Hall D, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
Join us for launch reading of Like a Hammer: Poets on Mass Incarceration, an anthology of poems that unearths the shared traumas produced by America’s carceral system. These powerful poems of witness address the oppressive systems that define the US prison-industrial complex, exposing cracks in a criminal justice system that often feels unchangeable. The impact of this system reverberates across generations. The poets gathered here foreground the real experiences of those affected, challenging dominant narratives, exposing injustice, and serving as a fulcrum for organizing communities. Like a Hammer explores how art and imagination can be vehicles for endurance, offering hope to envision a better future.
Panelist Bios:
Angel Nafis is the author of BlackGirl Mansion. She is a Cave Canem fellow, the recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, a creative writing fellowship from the NEA, and a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship. She teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College.
Photo credit: Justin J. Wee
Tongo Eisen-Martin is the author of Heaven Is All Goodbyes, which was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize and received the California Book Award in Poetry, an American Book Award, and a PEN Oakland Book Award. He is also the author of someone’s dead already. His newest collection is Blood on the Fog, from the City Lights Pocket Poets Series.
Photo credit: Shalom Bower
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of Magical/Realism (Tiny Reparations Books, 2024), longlisted for the National Book Award, and Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, 2017), recipient of a Whiting Award. She is a 2021 NEA fellow and holds a doctorate from the University of Southern California.
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a founding member of Undocupoets and the author of Children of the Land (HarperCollins, 2020), Cenzontle, (BOA Editions, 2018), Dulce (Northwestern University Press, 2018), and most recently, coeditor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (HarperCollins, 2024).
Diana Marie Delgado is the author of Tracing the Horse, a New York Times noteworthy pick, and the chapbook Late-Night Talks with Men I Think I Trust, winner of the Center for Book Arts’ 2015 Poetry Chapbook Competition. She is the editor of Like a Hammer: Poets on Mass Incarceration, forthcoming from Haymarket Books in March 2025. Delgado lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Photo credit: Roberto Bear Guerra