Gemini Ink Author Reading & Open Mic Featuring Jonathan Fletcher

Come celebrate Jonathan Fletcher and his new chapbook, This Is My Body: Poems, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. He will be joined by poets Alex Z. Salinas and Jen Yáñez-Alaniz.

Following the featured reading, we will host a community open mic. Bring your poems, stories, and thoughts to share (there will be a 3-minute limit for each reader). Open mic sign-up will be in person starting at 6:00pm, so be sure to arrive on time!

Food trucks are available on site. All ages are welcome. Under 18 must be accompanied by a parent or guardian.

Jonathan Fletcher holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts.  His work has been featured in numerous literary journals and magazines, and he has won or placed in various literary contests. A Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction nominee, he won Northwestern University Press’s Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize contest in 2023, for which his debut chapbook, This is My Body, was published in 2025.  Currently, he serves as a Zoeglossia Fellow.

Alex Z. Salinas is the author of four volumes of poetry, most recently Hispanic Sonnets and Trash Poems. His book of stories, City Lights From the Upside Down, was included in the National Book Critics Circle’s Critical Notes. He lives in San Antonio, Texas. His debut novel, The Dream Life of Larry Rios, is forthcoming in 2025 through FlowerSong Press.

Jen Yáñez-Alaniz is a Chicana Cúelcahén Ndé scholar, poet, and community organizer whose work centers on cultural preservation, land-based ceremony, and decolonial epistemologies. Her poetry can be found in There is So Much I Want to Tell You (Mouthfeel Press) and Somos Xicanas (Riot of Roses Publishing House), as well as in various anthologies and journals. She is the author of Surrogate Eater (Alabrava Press) and the forthcoming chapter, “Catalyzing academic writing through notions of sensuality, surrogacy, and consumption as examined in the poetry of Surrogate Eater and selected translingual poems,” in Decolonizing Academic Writing through Translingualism: Walking the Talk (Routledge Publishing). Jen also authored a critical biography of Carmen Tafolla in Chicana Portraits (University of Arizona Press). Her current manuscript, Pain Theory: Sweetness Ferments into a Beast, reflects poetically and critically on healing, endurance, and living beyond multiple autoimmune conditions.