CITY OF GOD @25: OCTOBER 19
READING PARTICIPANT BIOS

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Luis Alfaro was the resident playwright for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival from 2013–2019. Featured in over 25 anthologies, he teaches at USC. Luis was recently awarded the PEN America Theater Award for a Master American Dramatist, The United States Artist and the Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowships.

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Olga García Echeverría has been an educator for over 20 years. She is the author of Falling Angeles: Cuentos y Poemas, the self-published chapbook Lovely Little Creatures and a contributor to Imaniman: Poets Writing in The Anzaldúan Borderlands. Her work is also found in several anthologies and literary magazines.

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Alex Espinoza is the author of Still Water Saints and The Five Acts of Diego León. His newest book is Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime. The recipient of an NEA fellowship and an American Book Award, he’s the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at UC-Riverside.

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Omar González was born in the decade of disco and raised on the banks of the Rio Grande in El Paso. Omar’s first years were spent on the Tigua Indian reservation, raised by his grandmother, Elisa Villanueva. A 26-year survivor of HIV, Omar completed his Ph.D. in Chicana/o Studies at UCLA in 2019.

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Eloise Klein Healy, the author of nine books of poetry, was named the first Poet Laureate of Los Angeles in 2012. She was the founding chair of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. A Wild Surmise: New & Selected Poems was published in 2013. Her latest work is Another Phase.

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Roland Palencia is a pioneer Queer activist who founded Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos and VIVA!, a Queer Latin@ arts collective in the 1980s, where he met Gil Cuadros. His numerous awards include “Local Hero” by PBS-KCET. He is a ONE Archives Foundation board member, a theater and film producer.

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Christopher Anthony Velasco received his Master of Fine Arts from UC Santa Barbara. He received his BFA from California Institute of the Arts and also studied at Art Center College of Design and East Los Angeles College. Velasco is a former Getty Marrow Undergraduate Intern. He is mixed-media artist who utilizes self-portraiture, performance, and the documentation of the urban landscape, the obscure and gay identity.

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Terry Wolverton is author of 11 books of fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry, including Embers and Insurgent Muse: Life and Art at the Woman’s Building. She’s founder of Writers At Work, a creative writing studio in L.A., and Affiliate Faculty at Antioch University Los Angeles’ MFA Writing Program.