Lourdes Figueroa

Lourdes Figueroa is a queer Chicanx oral poet and award-winning poetry filmmaker whose work honors her family’s history working in el azadón in Yolo County. Based in San Francisco, she has worked as a case manager, advocate, translator, and community organizer. She has led poetry workshops at Marin Academy Literary Festival and College of Alameda and co-wrote Fugue (2017), celebrating LGBTQIA+ history in the Mission. During the pandemic, she created Paru-paru y Colibri, an intergenerational writing workshop with SOMCAN, funded by an SFAC grant. Her chapbooks include yolotl, Ruidos = To Learn Speak, and Vuelta (Nomadic Press). In 2021 she received the Nomadic Press Bay Area Literature Award for Poetry, her poem “Pieces” from yolotl was a 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee, and her long verse poem I will kiss your mouth b/w the overgrown Milpa is forthcoming in Mexico. Her latest work appears in Tierra Adentro and the poetry film Las Marimacha Fragments, made with filmmaker Peggy Peralta, A Good Symptom (3rd Thing’s Press). A native of limbo nation, she celebrates the pocha marimachita tongue and believes in your lung and throat.