Who tends to the poet’s wounds?
What becomes of pain when it is spoken aloud, witnessed, transformed?
Can language itself be a limpia?
The Institute for Latino Studies and the Creative Writing Program invite you to Ritual y Sanación, an evening of poetry, performance, and healing with visiting poet Xavier Cavazos and PhD student Karla Maravilla.
Cavazos will perform an intimate reading from his poetry collection The Devil’s Workshop, winner of the 2024 Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur Award, which is given to “the best on the frontier of poetry, the experimental, the innovative, the daring and stunning, the impromptu in technique and voice.” Cavazos will be performing alongside his mentee, Karla Maravilla, in a semi-formal, call-and-response poetic exchange that moves through themes of grief, trauma, assault, and addiction. Their goal is to place vulnerability at the center of their reading as an act of folk ritual and transformation rooted in brujeria or witchcraft in the forms of curanderismo and santeria. Reception to follow.
In addition to the evening’s performance, Cavazos will be serving as a visiting poet for the week at Notre Dame. His duties include a class visit to Latinx Poetry Now!, an Oral History Interview, and a joint artist residency with Maravilla at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art as part of “Poets and Art,” a multi-year partnership between Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the Institute for Latino Studies, and the Raclin Museum to create new literary art in response to the Museum’s permanent collection.
Xavier Cavazos is a Nuyorican Grand Slam Champion (‘95) and the author of three award-winning poetry collections: Barbarian at the Gate (Poetry Society of America), Diamond Grove Slave Tree (Ice Cube Press), and The Devil’s Workshop (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), winner of the 2024 Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur Award. His poetry has been widely anthologized, including in Best American Experimental Writing (BAX) and Under the Pomegranate Tree: Best American Latino Erotica. Currently, Cavazos serves as a senior poetry editor for Poetry Northwest and teaches in the Professional and Creative Writing Program at Central Washington University.
Karla Yaritza Maravilla Zaragoza is an English PhD student and Joseph Gaia Distinguished Fellow in Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her research examines Latinx literature at the intersection of health, religion, education, and sustainability, with a focus on how latinidad shapes narratives of labor, wellness, spirituality, and ecojustice in the hyper-contemporary. She is especially interested in the figure of la curandera and the evolution of curanderismo in Chican@/Latinx literature as a reoccurring ancestral practice that reframes health and personhood while deconstructing colonial legacies in the twenty-first century Americas. She is also a poet published in Poetry Northwest, The Acentos Review, Palette Poetry, and Huizache.
Ritual y Sanación is also undertaken in fulfillment of the requirements of the Leadership Advancing Socially Engaged Research—LASER—experiential training program.