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Presentation: Poetry Recitation by Angela C. Trudell Vasquez - "What and That".
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Angela (Angie) C. Trudell Vasquez is a poet, writer, performer, and activist. A third and second generation Mexican-American from Iowa, her father was the first person in the family to go to college and her parents read to her nightly as a child instilling a love of literature, words, and justice. She earned a BA from Drake University, where she was nominated for and became a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. She received her MFA in Creative Writing in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA.edu) where she studied with Sherwin Bitsui, Joan Kane, and Santee Frazier.
Vasquez’s poems have appeared in Taos Journal of Poetry, Yellow Medicine Review, Raven Chronicles, The Rumpus, Return to the Gathering Place of the Waters, and Cloudthroat. In 2003 she was a featured poet and performer at Bumbershoot, Seattle’s annual music and art festival. From 2009 to 2011 she was the featured poet for the Latina Monologues in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She was the guest poet for the Haiku Festival in Chicago in 2018.
Vasquez received a Voices Award from Planned Parenthood for poetry she performed at their 2013 Roe V. Wade celebration event in Madison, Wisconsin. In 2016 she took the youth poetry workshop she developed for the ACLU of Wisconsin to Split This Rock! In 2018 she was a finalist for the New Women’s Voices Series and her chapbook, In Light, Always Light, was published in 2019 by Finishing Line Press. Twice she has been nominated for a Pushcart, once for a poem and once for an essay. Her poem, ‘What and That,” has been nominated for the Orison Anthology, best spiritually engaged poetry, for 2019.