Kelly Writer's House presents: Song and Grito, Poets Laureate Singing through Grief, with Raina León, the current poet laureate of Philadelphia, and ire'ne lara silva, the 2023 poet laureate of Texas

We hope you can join us for Song and Grito, Poets Laureate Singing through Grief, with Raina León, the current poet laureate of Philadelphia, and ire'ne lara silva, the 2023 poet laureate of Texas on Monday, September 28, 2026 at 6PM at Kelly Writer’s House (3805 Locust Walk).

This event is organized by Kelly Writer's House and co-sponsored by CLALS. The event will feature and celebrate two contemporary Latinx poets. Brief bios from the writers here: Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is the 2026-2027 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo. She is the author of black god mother this body, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, sombra : (dis)locate, and the chapbooks,profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She publishes across forms in visual art, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and scholarly work. She has received fellowships and residencies and attended retreats with The Watering Hole, the ObsidianFoundation, Community of Writers, Montana Artists Refuge, Macdowell, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale, among others. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She co-founded the Wild Indigo Poetry Reading Series (2024) in Germantown, Philadelphia with Sarah Browning in deep partnership with Young American Cider and Reclaim Philadelphia, which will celebrate two years of programming in September 2026. She is a recipient of a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Grant, a Leeway Transformation Award (2025), Letras Boricuas Fellowship (2025), and a Velocity Fund Grant (2026). She retired early as a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, only the third Black person (all Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve that rank there; she is professor emerita there. She teaches poets and writers at theStonecoast MFA at the University of Southern Maine and will teach poetry at Bryn Mawr College as a visiting professor starting in Fall 2026. She is additionally a digital archivist, emerging visual artist, writing coach, and curriculum developer. She is an enrolled Higuayagua Taíno tribal member and (very slowly) learning Hiwatahia.

ire’ne lara silva, 2023 Texas State Poet Laureate, is the author of five poetry collections, furia, Blood Sugar Canto, CUICACALLI/House of Song, FirstPoems, andthe eaters of flowers, which won Gold for the 2025 Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book (ILBA), a comic book, VENDAVAL, and two short story collections, flesh to bone, which won the Premio Aztlán, and the light of your body. ire’ne is the recipient of the 2026 Jessie H. Jones Fellowship, the ILBA 2025 Rising Stars Poetry Award, a 2025 Storyknife Writers Residency, the 2021 Texas Institute of Letters ShrakeAward for Best Short Nonfiction, a 2021 Tasajillo Writers Grant, a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, and was the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award. http://www.irenelarasilva.wordpress.com