BONK! Celebrates Hispanic History Month with Féi Fernandez, Araceli Esparza, and Jennifer Morales

féi hernandez (b.1993 Chihuahua, Mexico) is a trans, Inglewood- raised, formerly undocumented immigrant artist, writer, healer. They have been published in POETRY, Pank Magazine, Oxford Review of Books, Frontier Poetry, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, amongst others. They are a Define American Fellow for 2021 and are currently the Board President of Gender Justice Los Angeles. féi is the author of the full-length poetry collection Hood Criatura (Sundress Publications 2020) which was on NPR’s Best Books of 2020. féi collects Pokémon plushies.

Araceli Esparza, is a Latinx Poeta. Araceli’s work has been published in Madison Magazine, Verse Wisconsin, and several anthologies, and you can hear her poetry on Wisconsin LIfe archives. She is an MFA graduate from Hamline University. Araceli was born and raised in Madison, WI; her parents were migrant farmworkers from Guanajuato, Mexico, from whom she still gathers her strength. She recently co-edited a poetry anthology with Flying Ketchup Press, The Very Edge Poems, that can be bought at local bookstores and Amazon. Her business journey story was also featured in Hispanic Star Rising by Claudia Romo Edelman. Araceli was named 2018 Wisconsin’s Most Influential Latina by the Wisconsin State Journal and Madison 365.

Jennifer Morales is a poet, fiction writer, and performance artist based in rural Wisconsin. She is a graduate of Beloit College (BA, Modern Languages and Literatures) and Antioch University-Los Angeles (MFA, Creative Writing, Fiction). Her first book, Meet Me Halfway (UW Press 2015), a short story collection about life in hyper-segregated Milwaukee, was Wisconsin Center for the Book’s 2016 “Book of the Year,” among other honors. Recent publications include “Cousins,” a short story in Milwaukee Noir (Akashic 2019), “The Boy Without a Bike,” in Cutting Edge, edited by Joyce Carol Oates (Akashic 2019), and “The Doorman,” in Fire & Water: Stories from the Anthropocene (Black Lawrence 2021). Jennifer is president of the board of the Driftless Writing Center, based in Viroqua, Wis.