Las Cruces Public Libraries is holding a series of poetry discussions/crafting sessions called Palabras y Artesanias (Words and Crafts).
The first session begin on Tuesday, January 14, 2025, at Thomas Branigan Memorial Library, 200 E. Picacho Avenue.
This series is funded by the Latino Poetry – Places We Call Home grant, a project to foster nationwide conversations through a groundbreaking new poetry anthology.
The anthology is divided into eight themes:
- Ancestry and Identity – Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2025 /SESSION IS NOW COMPLETED
- Language – Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2025 / SESSION IS NOW COMPLETED
- Voice and Resistance – Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2025 / SESSION IS NOW COMPLETED
- First and Second Homes – Tuesday, Mar. 4, 2025 / SESSION IS NOW COMPLETED
- Family and community Tuesday, Mar. 18, 2025
- Music and performance Tuesday, Apr. 8, 2025
- Labor Tuesday, Apr. 15, 2025
- Earth and Myth Tuesday, Apr. 22, 2025
Our fifth event is on the theme of Family and Community. This takes place Tuesday, March 18, 2025. Poetry often speaks to the bonds of family and community. How have Latino poets depicted these relationships—among children, parents, and grandparents, between intimate partners, and within wider communities, informal networks of support, and “chosen families”?
What sorts of practices and rituals surrounding family and community do we find in Latino poetry, and how have poets explored the effects of migration, generational change, and other circumstances on these traditions?
Additional sessions of this series will take place beginning at 4 p.m. on select Tuesdays through April at the Thomas Branigan Memorial Library. You can find more information about the eight-session series on the library events calendar or click on the link to each remaining session above.
We invite you to read the poems that reflect the session themes within the anthology prior to the session. Copies of the selected poems for the session will be available online through the events calendar link, and at Las Cruces Public Libraries Picacho Avenue location.
This program is presented as part of Latino Poetry: Places We Call Home, a major public humanities initiative taking place across the nation in 2024 and 2025, directed by Library of America and funded with generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Emerson Collective.
For information, contact Mindy Del Campo, Librarian, at (575) 528-4024 or by email at adelcampo@lascruces.gov.
