The Open Door series highlights poetry as an expansive and relational art form practiced by Midwest writers and their collaborators. April’s featured readers are Flor Flores with Maricela Guerrero Reyes, and Érika Ordos with Jules Zinn.
Flor Flores is a transdisciplinary artist and poet whose creative works revolve around queer belongings. Some themes in their works include flowers as a symbol for self (Flor); Kiki, a queer monarch butterfly who enjoys going to the discotheque; and X a poem about the letter X and its deployment in Latinx, its other uses as a gesture of inclusion, erasure, and a placeholder for a language that is yet to come. Flor is an editor at Kiki Club Editions and recently published Kiki-A Sky of Changing Lights...
Maricela Guerrero is a poet, writer, and teacher born in Mexico City in 1977. She writes on how to restore our relationship to the environment from urban spaces. She also designs and facilitates workshops that combine writing, mindfulness and meditation to find better ways to inhabit this world. She is the author of nine poetry collections, including El sueño de toda célula (Ediciones Antílope/Instituto Veracruzano de la Cultura, Mexico City, 2018, recipient of the Clemencia Isaura Prize in 2018); Kilimanjaro, translated by Stalina Villareal (Cardboard House Press, 2018); and The dream of Every Cell, translated by Robin Myers in 2022. Guerrero has been a fellow of the prestigious National System of Artists in Mexico. Her work has been translated into German, Swedish, and French.
Érika Ordos has focused their research on the concept of freedom and the mechanisms of power. They incorporate their body as a fundamental symbol, representing a space of struggle, as the body is the primary target of power and the vehicle of freedom. They see poetry as an austere medium, requiring no technology or resources. This versatility gives it a quality that fosters acts of autonomy. Their work is based on an ethic in which poetry is the result of a pulsation. In this new phase, they aim to focus on poetry and audiovisual productions where their poems serve as literary scripts and their performances as the staging.
Jules Zinn is a film/video artist, musician, and researcher/archivist of erotic media history. Their video work focuses on viscerality and the ambiguous, subterranean emotional realm of the horrific/erotic and explores their process of hormonal physical change by using their body as an experimentation zone and medium. They examine the boundaries and compulsions of the body/spirit, the nature of being made of flesh, and how these operate in solitude and through vital connection with others.
This is a hybrid event, which will be offered in-person and via livestream.
