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Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is a Latina poet and prose writer born in San Gabriel, California and based in Los Angeles.

INFOBOX

Name: Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

Born: San Gabriel, California

Date of Birth: Circa 1980 [1]

Education: Antioch University, Los Angeles, California

Occupation: Poet and Teacher

Notable Awards: 2016-17 Steinbeck Fellow

Biography

Early Life and Education

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo was born and raised in San Gabriel, California. She received a BA in Theatre Arts from California State University of Long Beach and an MFA in Creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles where she is currently a book coach and workshop instructor with the inspiration2publication program.

Career

Bermejo has had her work published in various publications, has published one book of poetry and is involved with various organizations promoting poetry and the involvement of women in literature. Publications featuring her work include The Acentos Review, American Poetry Review, CALYX, The James Franco Review, The Los Angeles Review, Lumen Magazine, Lunch Ticket, Malpais Review, and The Nervous Breakdown among others. She was an editor for the 5th edition of the James Franco Review and is a founding editor of The Splinter Generation [1]. She is also a cofounder and curator for the quarterly HITCHED reading series and is a co-founder of Women Who Submit, an organization dedicated to promoting and encouraging women to submit to literary journals and clarifying the submission and publication process [4]. She has published one collection of original poems entitled Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge. [5]

Works

POETRY:

The Acentos Review: “I Didn’t Know I could Love the Desert,” “Nobody Wanted a Mountain to Hate Him,” and “Paper Birds” [November 2012]

Angels Flight literary west: “Standing Before Zorba the Great,” “The Story of the Stolen Metate,” and “Posada” [July 2016]

Cultural Weekly: “The Ascension of Josseline” and “Our Lady of the Water Gallons” [July 2013]

Poets Responding to SB 1070, La Bloga Online Floricanto: “The Boys of summer” [January 2015]

Lumen Magazine: “Cascarones” [July 2015]

Lunch Ticket: “A Corrido for Macondo” a poetic collaboration with Joe Jiménez [Winter/Spring 2017]

Travel By the Books: “El Capitán of Isla Negra” [Summer 2014]

PROSE:

Entropy: “Mini-Syllabus: Writing Poetry for Social Change” [September 2016]

The James Franco Review: “La Busqueda” [August 2015]

Lunch Ticket: “Submission as Social Action” [Summer/Fall 2015]

The Nervous Breakdown: “A Baldwin Park Story” [January 2015]

Terrain.org: “Los Angeles May Be Ugly, but It’s Ours: a Review of LAtitudes” [2015]

Women Who Submit blog: “Building Up to Emerging” [June 2016] [7]

BOOKS:

Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge [2016]

Literary Style and Themes

Although Bermejo’s work is not autobiographical, her writing draws from the experiences of Chicano people living in the borderlands between the United States and Mexico. She has said that “Built with Safe Spaces was inspired by Los Angeles, my grandmother, and the Arizona-Mexico border where I volunteered as a desert aid worker in the summers of 2011 and 2013. By traveling from the green hills of Los Angeles to the jagged canyons of the Sonoran desert, it is my hope these poems illustrate a speaker driven to activism by a need to honor her family's journey as Mexican immigrants” [6]. Many of her poems feature descriptions of the natural landscapes of the borderlands, and the ways in which they inform the cultural and historical memory of the people inhabiting those spaces. Her collection Posadas begins in the personal and familial, tracing her own heritage through stories told to her by her father, mother, aunts, uncles and grandparents. It progresses to the struggles of migrants as they attempt to cross the unforgiving terrain in the Mexican-American border. It closes out by gathering the voices of migrants and depicting their stories, always grounded in the unforgiving but beautiful and real landscape that surrounds them [6].

Honors, decorations, awards and distinctions

2016-2017 Steinbeck Fellow

2013 Poetry Winner of Poets & Writers California Writer’s Exchange

2012 Los Angeles Central Library ALOUD Newer Poet

Sources

Palacio, Melinda. “Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo’s Road to Winning.” La Bloga. Web. Accessed March 6 2017. http://labloga.blogspot.com/2012/12/xochitl-julisa-bermejos-road-to-winning.html  [1]

Bermejo, Xochitl-Julisa. “About.” Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo. Web. Accessed March 6 2017. https://xochitljulisa.wordpress.com/about/  [2]

NM. “Non Fiction by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo.” The James Franco Review. Web. Accessed March 8 2017. https://thejamesfrancoreview.com/2015/08/26/non-fiction-by-xochitl-julisa-bermejo/  [3]

“WWS Leadership.” Women Who Submit. Web. Accessed March 8 2017. https://womenwhosubmitlit.wordpress.com/wws-leadership/     [4]

Sedano, Michael. “Twelve. Bermejo Launches Posada.” La Bloga. Web. Accessed March 7 2017. http://labloga.blogspot.com/2016/11/twelve-bermejo-launches-posada.html  [5]

Echeverría, Olga García. “Put Your Name On It": Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo on Writing, Submitting, and Honoring Our Creative Work.” La Bloga. Web. Accessed March 6 2017.

Echeverría, Olga García. “Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge.” La Bloga. Web. Accessed March 9 2017. http://labloga.blogspot.com/2016/10/posada-offerings-of-witness-and-refuge.html  [6]

Bermejo, Xochitl-Julisa. “Publications.” Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo. Accessed March 9 2017. https://xochitljulisa.wordpress.com/contact/ [7]

MULTIMEDIA

https://vimeo.com/67070748 - reading/dramatization of “Our Lady of Water Gallons”

https://vimeo.com/195402551  - reading of two texts from Posadas