Odilia Galván Rodríguez – poet, writer, editor, publisher, and social justice activist, is the author of six volumes of poetry, her latest The Color of Light, FlowerSong Books 2019. She is a long-time community organizer and volunteer. She has worked as the editor for Matrix Women’s News Magazine, Community Mural’s Magazine, Tricontinental Magazine in Havana, Cuba and currently edits two journals Cloud Women’s Quarterly and Anacua Literary Arts. Galván Rodríguez facilitates creative writing workshops and offers readings from her books nationally. She is one of the founders of the Facebook page Poets Responding, and co-author of the groundbreaking and award-winning anthology Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice, University of Arizona Press. Her poetry and writings have appeared in numerous anthologies, and literary journals on and offline. She is a practitioner of Indigenous Spiritual and Healing Traditions and strives to live a simple life based on the indigenous worldview of her ancestors.
Cathy Arellano is just another poet from San Francisco’s Mission District. Arellano’s I LOVE MY WOMEN, SOMETIMES THEY LOVE ME is a collection of broken-hearted lesbian love poems suitable for anyone who has loved, been loved, or been left. Arellano’s SALVATION ON MISSION STREET, a family memoir in poems and stories set in SF from the 1960s to the 2000s,won the 2017 Golden Crown Literary Society’s Debut Author Award.Arellano teaches Writing at American River College and is the Puente English Coordinator.
