The CultureStrike Arts Festival will feature the following readers and artists:

Daniel Alarcón
Jeff Biggers
Sherwin Bitsui
Teju Cole
Mike Davis
James Garcia
Alfredo Gutierrez
Jessica Hagedorn
James Kass
Roberto Lovato
Logan Phillips
Alberto Rios
Rinku Sen

Daniel Alarcón is author of the story collection War by Candlelight, a PEN-Hemingway Award finalist, and Lost City Radio, named a Best Novel of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle, and Washington Post, and winner of the 2009 International Literature Prize given by the House of World Culture in Berlin. Associate Editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning quarterly published in his native Lima, Peru, he was named one of The New Yorker’s 20 under Forty.

Jeff Biggers is an American Book Award-winning author of Reckoning at Eagle Creek, The United States of Appalachia and In the Sierra Madre. His award-winning stories have appeared on National Public Radio, Washington Post, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, and the Huffington Post, where he blogs. The play he wrote–4 1/2 Hours: Across the Stones of Fire–has appeared on Off Broadway and at theatres around the country. He is a founder of the Northern Arizona Book Festival.

Sherwin Bitsui is a poet from originally from the Navajo Reservation in White Cone, Arizona. He The author of the poetry collections Shapeshift and Flood Song, he has been honored by PEN and the Witter Bynner and Lannan Foundations and received a Whiting Award, a Tucson MOCA Local Genius Award, and an American Book Award. Currently living in Tucson, Arizona, he is Dine of the Todich’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl’izilani (Many Goats Clan).

Teju Cole is the author of the novella, Every Day is for the Thief, and the novel, Open City, which the New York Times said pointed to the possibility of the Great World Novel. Born in the US to Nigerian parents, he has been published by Qarrtsiluni, the New Yorker, and Tin House, and is Professor and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.

Mike Davis is a Macarthur Fellow and the author of more than twenty books, including Planet of Slums, No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border, and City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, which was named best book in urban politics by the American Political Science Association and won the Isaac Deutscher Award from the London School of Economics. A scholar of urban studies, the built environment, economic history and social movements, he has been honored by the Lannan Literary Foundation. A former meat cutter, truck driver, and a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist, he is a professor at UC Riverside and an editor of the New Left Review.

James Garcia is a journalist, university instructor and playwright whose work has appeared in National Public Radio’s Latino USA and ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. His columns were distributed nationally by the New America Writers Series via the New York Times Syndicate and the Cox News Service. Former editor-in-chief of Latino Perspectives Magazine, James was the first Latino editor-in-chief of a major alternative newsweekly in The Nation, The San Antonio Current. A lecturer at Arizona State University, James is the author of the plays Don Juan: Love After Death, Borderlines, Ghost Dance Messiah, and The Crossing, which earned a Kennedy Center Award at the 2003 American College Theater Festival in Washington, D.C.

Alfredo Gutierrez, born and raised in Miami, Arizona, was a 2002 Arizona gubernatorial candidate and a member of the Arizona State Senate from 1972-1986, where he was both the majority and minority leader. A founder of Phoenix community advocacy groups Chicanos Por La Causa and Valle del Sol, he has been honored by Arizona State University and the University of Arizona.

Jessica Hagedorn is the author of the novels Toxicology, Dream Jungle, The Gangster Of Love (nominated for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize), and Dogeaters, which was nominated for a National Book Award. The former leader of the band The Gangster Choir, Jessica is the recipient of a Lucille Lortel Playwrights’ Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fiction Fellowship, and fellowships from the Sundance Playwrights’ Lab and the Sundance Screenwriters’ Lab. Her recent theater work includes Most Wanted, Fe In The Desert, Stairway To Heaven, and the stage adaptation of Dogeaters, presented at La Jolla Playhouse and at the NYSF/Public Theater.

James Kass is the Founder and Executive Director of Youth Speaks, a national poetry and spoken word youth nonprofit. Winner of a 1997 Bay Guardian Fiction Award and a 1999 Poetry Award, James was a 1996 San Francisco Poetry Slam Champion. He has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, ABC, Nightline, Source, Vibe and National Public Radio.

Roberto Lovato is a writer with New America Media and a frequent contributor to The Nation and the Huffington Post. Roberto has also appeared as a commentator in the New York Times, the Washington Post Univision, and CNN, Democracy Now. Roberto is also a founding member of Presente.org. Roberto was the Executive Director of the Central American Resource Center, then the country’s largest immigrant rights organization.

Logan Phillips is a bilingual writer, performer, and multimedia artist from the Arizona/Mexico borderlands. Born in Tombstone, AZ to a family of Irish-Slavic descent, he holds a BA in Spanish from Northern Arizona University. A professor of Hispanic American Literature and translation at Universidad Internacional in Cuernavaca, Mexico before dedicating himself full-time to artistic endeavors, Phillips has toured throughout the US and Mexico and as far afield as Vancouver, Paris, Bogotá, and Penzance, England. Also a freelance journalist, he has authored five poetry chapbooks including Arroyo Ink, published in 2009. In 2007, he co-founded the binational multimedia performance group Verbobala Spoken Video.

Alberto Rios’s poetry collections include Dangerous Shirt, The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body (2002), which was nominated for the National Book Award, and Whispering to Fool the Wind (1982), which won the Walt Whitman Award. Included in more than ninety major literary anthologies, including the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Alberto’s work has won six Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and fiction, the Arizona Governor’s Arts Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University.

Rinku Sen is the Executive Director of the Applied Research Center and Publisher of Colorlines.com. She is the author of The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization, which won the Nautilus Book Award Silver Medal, and Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing. A columnist at Colorlines, Huffington Post, and Jack and Jill Politics, Rinku has written for Forbes, The San Francisco Chronicle, and AlterNet. A guest on on NPR, Fox News, and The Tavis Smiley Show, she has been named one of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World” (Utne Reader) and one of 21 feminists to watch in the 21st century (Ms. Magazine).

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