Speaking Axolotl is a Chicanx/Latinx reading series in its third year that happens the third Thursday of every month at Nomadic Press at 111 Fairmount Avenue in Oakland.

The series is pleased to be running this showcase for Virtual Beast 2021!

Kevin Madrigal Galindo is a food justice advocate that is reimagining health with ancestral Mexican cooking. He is a first-generation Chicano hijo de su chingada madre from South San Francisco by way of Zapopan, Jalisco. In 2016, he co-founded Farming Hope with folks experiencing homelessness. Kevin is a recipient of the Brooklyn Poets Retreat Fellowship for 2021, and his work has been featured in The Boiler, Bozalta, The San Franciscan, Edible East Bay, & Quiet Lightning. His first chapbook “Hell/a Mexican” will be published with Nomadic Press in 2022.

Kevin shines light on the comunidad whose work supports countless American lives. In his free time, you can find him cooking vegan enchiladas verdes to highly curated R&B playlists.

Camilo Garzón (b. 1993, Bogotá, Colombia) is a Colombian-American writer, editor, and multimedia producer. He is also an interdisciplinary artist and poet based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the current artist-in-residence at on-off.site and his work has been read to an audience for Play On Words, the San José Museum of Art, LITEROCALYPSE, and The Emperor’s New Prose. He also recently won one of the inaugural San Francisco Foundation/Nomadic Press Literary Awards in poetry.

Leticia Hernández-Linares is an award-winning, interdisciplinary, bilingual writer, artist, and racial justice educator. She is the author of Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl & Alejandria Fights Back! ¡La lucha de Alejandria! A long-time Mission resident, she teaches in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University, and is currently an Artist in Residence at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Josiah Luis Alderete is a full blooded Pocho, spanglish speaking poeta who first learned how to write poesia in the kitchen of his Mama’s Mexican restaurant. He was one of the founding member of Bay Area outspoken word group “The Molotov Mouths” and is the curator and host of the long running monthly Chicano/Latinx reading series “Speaking Axolotl”. This year he had the honor of being one of the recipients of the 2021 San Francisco Fondation/Nomadic Press Literary Award and also had his first book of poems “Baby Axolotls & Old Pochos” published by Black Freighter Press.