Workshop: Places We Call Home with Brenda Cárdenas *IN PERSON*

This workshop is free to attend, but space is limited, and registration is required. 

Besides the house you live in now, what places, people, other beings, or objects have felt like home to you? A river, forest, mountain, garden, lake, desert, or park? A mother, father, loving partner, community? A dog, cat, birds that visit your backyard, the neighborhood fox? A shelter, barn, old cabin? A language? A painting? A book? A city, town, country, continent? Your own body? In this free workshop, after reading and discussing example poems from the new Library of America Latino Poetry anthology and engaging in an exercise that helps us find the most specific language possible to animate our work, we will write poems regarding or riffing off of these alternative notions of home. If you are able, please bring photographs of some of the places, people, or other beings that are the places you call home. 

Current Wisconsin Poet Laureate Brenda Cárdenas has authored Trace (Red Hen Press), winner of the 2023 Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry and silver winner of Foreword Review’s Indie Poetry Prize; Boomerang (Bilingual Press); and three chapbooks. She also co-edited Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance and Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest. Her poems have been published in such venues as Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Braving the Body, and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Anthology, and Kinship: in a World of Relations. Cárdenas has served as Milwaukee’s Poet Laureate and is Professor Emerita of English at UW–Milwaukee.

Please also join us for a related poetry reading and panel discussion taking place on Sun. Apr. 13 at 2 pm, and featuring poets whose work is published in Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology. 

Both programs are presented in partnership with Letras Latinas, the literary initiative of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, which strives to enhance the visibility, appreciation, and study of Latinx literature with an emphasis on programs that support newer voices, foster a sense of community among writers, and place Latinx writers in community spaces.

Both are also 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.

Library of America is a nonprofit organization that champions our nation’s cultural heritage by publishing America’s greatest writing in authoritative new editions and providing resources for readers to explore this rich, living legacy.