Watershed Reading Series

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provided by Arts + Lit Lab

Alejandro Lucero, Han Raschka and Steven Espada Dawson (from left).

Alejandro Lucero, Han Raschka and Steven Espada Dawson (from left).

This triple bill features two Madison poets and visitor Alejandro Lucero, from Baltimore. Lucero’s poetry, collected in a 2024 chapbook, Sapello Son, features sharp, searing imagery. Han Raschka identifies as feminist poet whose work “focuses on personal and collective traumas, resilience, and queer existence.” And Madison poet laureate Steven Espada Dawson’s debut collection, Late to the Search Party, is due out from Scribner’s in 2025.

media release: Join us on Saturday, July 20, 2024 at 7:00 PM for our July Watershed Reading featuring Alejandro Lucero, Han Raschka, and Steven Espada Dawson. Lucero and Raschka will be signing and selling their books.

Alejandro Lucero’s chapbook, Sapello Son (Bull City Press, 2024), was named the Editors’ Selection for the 2022 Frost Place Competition. His latest work appears in Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, The Florida Review, RHINO, and The Southern Review. He lives in Baltimore, where he teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and is a managing editor for The Hopkins Review.

Han Raschka is a Pushcart-nominated feminist poet whose work focuses on personal and collective traumas, resilience, and queer existence. They have been published in various periodicals such as Anti-Heroin Chic, Eunoia Review, The Lake County Bloom, and CERASUS Magazine, among others. They have received fellowships from the San Francisco Creative Writing Institute and Brooklyn Poets and were featured as Poet of the Week with Brooklyn Poets. Their first collection, Splinters (Collapse Press) was released in 2022 and was nominated for the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award. In 2023, they released a chapbook, Enamel (Bottlecap Press). Han was a 2023 finalist for the Charles M. Hart Jr. Award and a 2024 finalist for the Therese Muller Memorial Nonfiction Award at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they study creative writing. They currently reside in Madison, WI with their fiancée.

Steven Espada Dawson is from East Los Angeles. The son of a Mexican immigrant, he is a former Ruth Lilly Fellow and Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellow. He recieved his MFA in the Midwest, served as a poetry editor for Copper Nickel and Sycamore Review, and has taught creative writing at universities, libraries, and prisons across the country. His poems appear in many journals and have been anthologized in Best New Poets, Pushcart Prize, and Sarabande’s Another Last Call. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he serves as Poet Laureate.