LOCAL>> Katerina Canyon – Surviving Home

In conversation with Lisbeth Coiman

Concisely arresting and challenging the beliefs of family and the fantasies of tradition, the poems in Surviving Home show that home is a place that you survive rather than a place where you are nurtured.

With unyielding cadence and unparalleled sadness and warmth, I contemplate the prejudice and limitations buried in a person’s Black heritage: parents that seem to care for you with one hand and slap you with the other, the secret desires to be released from the daily burdens of life, as well as the surprising ways a child chooses to amuse herself.

Katerina Canyon is a 2020 and 2019 Pushcart Prize Nominee. Her stories have been published in New York Times and Huffington Post. From 2000 to 2003, she served as the Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga. During that time, she started a poetry festival and ran several poetry readings.  She was featured in the Los Angeles Times and was awarded the Montesi Award from Saint Louis University in 2011, 2012, and 2013. She has published multiple chapbooks and an album.

Lisbeth Coiman is a bilingual writer, educator, cultural commentator, and rezandera from Venezuela. As a bilingual poet, Coiman strives to magnify the voices of the struggle in Venezuela, those who migrate out of despair, and those who stay behind to fight a thousand battles for freedom. In her poetry, she seeks to create awareness about the human rights violations and the humanitarian crisis afflicting her homeland and those she holds dear to her heart.