Description
Poetry. Women's Studies. California Studies. TRAILER TRASH is a book about the cotton-country of Riverside County, Southern California, in the 1980s/90s. A book about poverty, ravaged landscape, and gender, it touches on a fuller, dustier California than Hollywood would have you believe. It is not only a book of class and struggle, it is also a book of triumph, beauty, and constructed worlds. It interfaces with grief and sanctuary in equal measure, creating a deeper understanding of origin stories. Never be ashamed of where you come from, these poems say, even when where you come from is broken, and dry, and made of tin.
Author Bio
July Westhale is a poet, translator, and essayist living in Oakland, CA. She is the author of VIA NEGATIVA (Kore Press, 2020), TRAILER TRASH (Kore Press, 2018) winner of the 2016 Kore Press Book Award, The Cavalcade (Finishing Line Press), Quantifiable Data (Alley Cat Books), and Occasionally Accurate Science (Nomadic Press). Her essays, poems, fiction, and translations are published in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies. When July isn't writing, she's teaching and working as an editor for PULP Magazine, a publication devoted to sexuality and reproductive rights. She is also a community educator, working with all ages of students in all types of settings—in after school programs, community colleges, libraries, living rooms, bookstores, fields, etc. Her work focuses on dismantling the inaccessibility of creative writing and bringing it into a contemporary focus as a necessary way for marginalized communities to archive their experiences. She is currently at work translating Patagonian poet, Rolando Cárdenas (1933-1990), with the hopes that her project will bring English-speaking audiences the work of writers censored and/or disappeared as a result of the 1973 coup d'état in Santiago. July has received support and funding from the California Humanities Council, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Alley Cat Books, Poets & Writers, Writing by Writers, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Lambda Literary Foundation.
Author City: OAKLAND, CA USA