The University of Arizona Press
Date: Saturday, July 19, 2025
When: 7:00-9:30 p.m., PDT
Where: 4308 Burns Ave, Los Angeles, CA
Danielle P. Williams, author of Chamorrita Song, will be one of the poets reading and writing at “Sister Love: A Love Letter Writing Kickback.” The Hamilton Library hosts a cozy evening of love letter writing encouraging participants to: “Grab your favorite pen, some cute stationery, and get ready to spread some love!” The event is inspired by the letters written by Pat Parker and Audre Lorde documented in the book Sister Love. This evening, participants will write letters to loved ones that they can hold and revisit like the pages of a good book. Whether you’re writing to your significant other, best friend, or even yourself, the gathering is about celebrating love in all its forms.
The event features poetry readings throughout the night. Register here for this free event. The Hamilton Library will provide paper, envelopes, pens, and colored pencils. The Hamilton Library is a Los Angeles-based project centered on cultural political resistance of the ruling class, racism, imperialism, and capitalism.
About the book:
For poet and spoken-word artist Danielle P. Williams, Kantan Chamorrita is more than just the ancient craft of Chamorro folk song. It is also a return and a homecoming. This impromptu style of communal call-and response performance art forms the spokes for Williams’s debut collection.
Rooted in oral tradition, Chamorrita Song pays homage to Black and Chamorro cultures, honoring the artistic expressions that these communities have created to reconcile lifetimes of imposed trauma. Bearing witness to these many narratives, Williams intertwines spoken word poetry and gospel music with Chamorro storytelling, weaving together the nuanced histories of queer, Black, and Indigenous existence and literature. Here Williams reveals capacious contemporary forms that speak to the future as well as to the past, and that further ground lineages in homelands, finding strength and beauty in collective pain and triumph. These poems transform and spread the messages of those long silenced. They act as song and prayer.
