Vickie Vértiz Bilingual Poetry Workshops Keynote Speaker
The oldest child of an immigrant Mexican family, Vickie Vértiz’s writing is featured in the New York Times Magazine, Nepantla, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and anthologies such as Open the Door (McSweeney’s & the Poetry Foundation), and The Coiled Serpent (from Tia Chucha Press), among others. Her book Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut won the 2018 PEN America poetry prize. Vickie’s given lectures and readings in France, Japan, Mexico City, and throughout the United States. She is currently teaching creative writing at Otis College of Art and Design.
Vickie is a storyteller who provides encouragement, ideas, and paths to persisting through difficulty and using writing to be the self-determined and tellers of our own stories.
Vickie’s poetic experimentation and nonfiction insights create narratives that probe the concerns of women, working class, and queer people of color. Vértiz’s poems ask us to see Los Angeles—and all cities like it—as they have always been: an America of code-switching and reinvention that replaces erasure with lyric and fight.
Vickie teaches students of all ages creative writing and gives talks on themes such as:
Fighting injustice through writing • Thriving as queer people of color • Writing toward our strengths and beauty, against shame and harm • Feminism, pedagogy, and intimacy • Class and education/knowledge • Multilingual writing • Valuing our home knowledges • When you're the only one: how to survive predominantly white environments • Beyond diversity: race and true equity in our college classrooms
“Before this class, I was never interested in writing. Your words and feedback have really encouraged me to pursue writing.”
“A groundbreaker, a Chicana world mural tumbling toward you fearlessly.”
Recorded on January 15, 2019, for Poem-a-Day, a series produced by the Academy of American Poets. www.poets.org
“Indicating array and incision, Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut, where the ones who are first, and last, come first. Their verbs survive, enduring violent spacing, constantly displacing song in having vividly been made to come, in form, as questions emphatically unenclosed, in love in brokenness, in the language of all languages, lit up as Los Angeles. On the way home, but always only on the way, Vickie Vértiz runs la vida down.”
“Thanks so much for your energy, candor, and brilliance. I don’t think there was a person in the room for whom your seminar was not invaluable.”