Sunday, Feb. 25 – Red Salmon Arts presents Una Tardeada Con Los Tres Veteranos: John Ross, Roberto Vargas and raulrsalinas. Join us to honor and celebrate the insurgent voices/poetry of three veteran writer/activists who play major roles in the artistic, political, and social struggles of the Sandinistas, Zapatistas, and the American Indian Movement. 4pm.
Author/correspondent/poet/and globetrotting troublemaker John Ross is the author of eight volumes of fiction and non-fiction including the recently released Zapatistas! Making Another World Possible – Chronicles of Resistance 2000-2006. Ross is the winner of both the American Book Award and the coveted Upton Sinclair Prize for his penultimate volume Murdered by Capitalism – 150 Years of Life and Death on the American Left. Ross is a rebel journalist with nearly 50 years on the front lines and a longtime contributor to the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Texas Observer, Noticias Aliadas (Lima), the Nation, Counterpunch, and KPFA’s Flashpoints. He has been called by La Jornada in Mexico City “the new John Reed covering a new Mexican revolution.”
Born in Managua, Nicaragua, Roberto Vargas lives in San Antonio, Texas and is a poet and community/labor organizer. He has been an appointee to the San Francisco Arts Commission, a diplomat at the Embassy of Nicaragua, and Public Policy Director for the William C. Velasquez research institute. In ’60′s and ’70′s, he was a founding member of The Pocho Che Collective, a loose coalition of writers who helped publish some of the first books of the contemporary Latino literary renaissance taking place in San Franisco, CA . The group also joined efforts with other writers to form the Third World Collective, which published the first anthology of literature written by women of color in the United States. Vargas is the author of two poetry collections published by the Pocho Che Collective, Primeros Cantos and Nicaragua, yo te canto besos, balas y sueños libertad/Nicaragua I sing you kisses bullets and visions of liberty.
Xicanindio elder poet/ human rights activist raúlrsalinas is the Director of Resistencia Bookstore/Casa de Red Salmon Press. Salinas conducts intensive creative writing clinics locally and throughout the country with disenfranchised youth. He has worked extensively with the American Indian Movement and the International Indian Treaty Council. raúl is the author of East of the Freeway, and Un Trip Through The Mind Jail, plus his latest 2006 release of Indio Trails: A Xicano Odyssey through Indian Country (Wings Press). In 2006, UT Press published a collection of his prison writings entitled, Raul R. Salinas & the Jail Machine: My Weapon is My Pen edited by Louis G, Mendoza. Since 2001, he has been an adjunct professor at St. Edwards University, Austin, Texas.
Resistencia Bookstore
casa de Red Salmon Arts
1801-A South First St.
Austin, Tejas
512-416-8885