On Wednesday, April 24th at 6pm (PST), join Massy Arts and Massy Books in welcoming author and academic Sneha Subramanian Kanta with guest Laura Villareal for a dual reading, and then a poetry workshop led by Sneha.

This project has been made possible by the Government of Canada. Ce projet a été rendu possible grâce au gouvernement du Canada.

Venue & Accessibility

The event will be hosted online, using Zoom. Registration is free and required.

About the books

Ancestral-Wing (Porkbelly Press, 2024) juxtaposes ancestral remembrance and gratitude while meditating on place. This collection of poems mingles ecology, tradition, and everyday. In devotion and through inventive syntax, these poems take the reader on a journey of recollecting our ancestors through grace. Language begins to take different shapes in the narrative. The collection of poems is a hymn, a prayer, an ode.

Girl’s Guide to Leaving (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022): “Fanged and feathered,” Laura Villareal fights against expectations imbedded in her existence—the expectations bound in being a woman, being queer, being Latinx—and claws her way to her own identity. Her poetry covers a vast range, invoking Mexican folklore, exploring the process of healing while hurting, and the complicated conflict between intergenerational trauma and the love of family—continuously reasserting that leaving is never a singular action, that healing isn’t completed in a day, that living is a process, not a straight line.

Tumbleweeds and wandering cacti litter the page, coyotes croon at the prose. In poems haunted by specters of intimate partner violence, Girl’s Guide to Leaving considers what it means to escape the love that trapped you and find a temporary home in the barely cooled ashes of a wildfire.

About the authors

Sneha Subramanian Kanta is the author of five chapbooks including Ancestral-Wing (Porkbelly Press, 2024) and Ghost Tracks (Louisiana Literature Press, 2020). Her multi-genre work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Contemporary Verse 2, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by several institutions including Ontario Arts Council, Tin House, The Charles Wallace Trust, The Vijay Nambisan Foundation, The Writers’ Union of Canada, British Council, and Rutgers University. She is one of the founding editors of Parentheses Journal. Website: http://www.snehasubramaniankanta.com

Laura Villareal is a poet and book critic. Her debut poetry collection, Girl’s Guide to Leaving, (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022) was awarded Texas Institute of Letters' John A. Robert Johnson Award for a First Book of Poetry and the Writers' League of Texas Book Award for Poetry. Her writing has appeared in Shenandoah, Guernica, AGNI, among others.