Of Poverty, Beauty & Joy

Readings from Michael Nava, Joanna Cifredo, Shelley Ettinger. Joanna Cifredo is as a Writer and Health Equity Advocate. Joanna started her career in community service as a youth health educator in Central Florida and eventually transitioned to direct services working for The Florida Department of Health where she provided case management services to those living with HIV/AIDS. After relocating to DC, she continued her service to the community lending her time to Empoderate DC’s only bilingual community center serving exclusively DC’s Latino MSM and Trans population after which she served as the Brand Ambassador to the DC Rape Crisis Center to Power a Culture of Consent. Michael Nava, a third-generation Californian of Mexican descent, and the grandson of immigrants, was born in Sacramento. He was the first person in his family to attend college, graduating with a B.A. in history from the Colorado College. He later received his law degree from Stanford University. A selection of his poems was awarded the 1981 Chicano/Latino Literary Prize given annually by the University of California, Irvine. He began writing what became his first novel as a third year law student at Stanford. That novel, The Little Death, was published in 1986 by Alyson Publications, a small gay press that accepted the book after 12 other publishers had rejected it. The Little Death introduced readers to Henry Rios, a gay, Latino criminal defense lawyer based primarily in Los Angeles. Six further Rios novels followed — Goldenboy (1988), Howtown (1990), The Hidden Law (1992), The Death of Friends (1994), The Burning Plain (1996), and Rag and Bone (2000). Each new novel was greeted with wider and greater critical acclaim. The books were awarded a total of six Lambda Literary Awards and in 2000 Nava was given the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in gay and lesbian literature. With Rage and Bone, Nava announced the end of his career as a mystery writer. He conceived a series of novels called The Children of Eve, after the line in the Salve Regina addressed to Mary, the mother of Jesus: “To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve.” The first novel in that series is The City of Palaces, which is set in Mexico City in the years before and at the beginning of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. In addition to his novels, Nava has had a distinguished career as an appellate lawyer working primarily in the California court system including the California Supreme Court. As a lawyer, he has been a tireless advocate for greater diversity in the legal profession. Shelley Ettinger was born in Detroit and lives in New York City. Her novel Vera's Will has been called "powerful, superbly written...a breathtaking achievement" by Library Journal and "a masterful novel...spectacular" by Lambda Literary Review. Her fiction and poetry have been published in many literary journals, including Mississippi Review, Nimrod, and Cream City Review. Shelley is a Lambda Literary Foundation Fellow, and has also received fellowships from the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Norcroft Writing Retreat for Women, and Barbara Deming/Money for Women Foundation. A longtime activist in the LGBTQ movement and in anti-racist, anti-war, and union struggles, Ettinger co-authored We Won't Be Slaves: Workfare Workers Organize--Workfairness & the Struggle for Jobs, Justice & Equality (IAC, 1997).