Cintia Santana
Photo: Rewa Bush

Cintia Santana and Dan Alter

28 APRIL 2024 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Dan Alter, My Little Book of Exiles, and Cintia Santana, The Disordered Alphabet, 2727 California Street, a cooperative art space, Berkeley, refreshments, free, 3:00 pm PDT (poetryflash.org).

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Featured books for this reading will be available for signing at the event and at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. This event will be posted on the Poetry Flash YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UClwdR-uPFNz7XxbBbLcnoEA.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Dan Alter's debut poetry collection is My Little Book of Exiles. Matthew Zapruder says, "'Could I have come from nowhere,' asks this poet, who searches his irretrievable past and mysterious present for meaning. Through gorgeous, ambitious, impeccable lyrics, provisionally and with a deep reverence for mysteries, he finds it again and again. This smart, funny, sad, kind book is an act of salvage, and solidarity, a pleasure to read, a wonderful achievement and a gift to us all." Dan Alter's writing can be understood as a spanning of many worlds and distances. He has published poems widely in journals including Field, Fourteen Hills, Pank, and ZYZZYVA. He has been a fellow of the Arad Arts Project, and a finalist for the Rosenberg Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience. He is a member of the Community of Writers at Olympic Valley, and holds an MFA from Saint Mary's College of California. He makes his living as an electrician and lives in Berkeley.

Cintia Santana's debut poetry collection, The Disordered Alphabet, was short-listed for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance 2023 Golden Poppy Award in Poetry and received the 2023 North American Book Award's Silver Medal in Poetry. David Baker says, "Cintia Santana is a superb new poet, serving up gusts of generative energy and acute intelligence. There's wordplay galore in The Disordered Alphabet, but so much more: temptation and swoon, confession, exposure, and the kind of daring formal agitation that accomplishes one rigorous shape after another to enable Santana's discoveries and her complex harmonic voicings. The alphabet may be disordered, and the cosmos awhirl, but this book is a crystalline achievement of rapture, balance, and brilliance." Santana's poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2016 and 2020, the Best of the Net Anthology 2023, Poets.org, Poetry Daily, Split this Rock, and numerous journals. Her honors include fellowships from CantoMundo and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She teaches literary translation and poetry workshops in Spanish and in English at Stanford University.