Wayward Creatures Book Launch: A Poetry Reading & Community Gathering

✦ We are thrilled to celebrate the launch of the poetry collection Wayward Creatures by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes! Join us for a celebratory evening featuring poetry readings by Cloud Delfina Cardona, ignacio carvajal, and heidi andrea restrepo rhodes; a moderated Q & A session; giveaways, refreshments, and poetic ecstasy ensue! Hosted by Host Publications editors Annar Veröld-Miranda & Claire Bowman!

In Wayward Creatures, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes offers poems as portals into a “wilderness of intimacies” where the crip marvelous, the sacred profane, and trans love emerge in an ecstatic throng. With a poetics that resists taxonomy, many voices surge through this collection. They speak us new names, and urge us toward vibrant becomings.

✦ Host Publications is an award-winning, women-led independent publisher located in Austin, Texas. Devoted to our mission to elevate historically marginalized writers, Host Publications publishes radical poetry and fiction by emerging LGBTQ+, BIPOC, intersectional feminist, and immigrant voices.

✦ Free & open to all lovers of literature.

✦ There will be small bites and light refreshments

✦ Health and safety note: masks are encouraged and will be provided.

✦ reader bios ✦

ignacio carvajal is a poet, scholar, and translator. ignacio is the author of the chapbooks allow – a litany – (La Resistencia Press 2021) and Plegarias, and his poems have appeared in places like the Acentos Review and the anthology The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States, among others. ignacio was born in costa rica; they teach Central & Latin American Literature, Latin American Studies and creative writing at the University of California San Diego. 

Cloud Delfina Cardona (she/they) is an artist, writer, and book cover designer from San Antonio, Texas. She is the author of What Remains, winner of the 2020 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, and the past is a jean jacket, winner of the Hub City Press BIPOC Poetry Series. She is the co-founder of Infrarrealista Review, a literary nonprofit that publishes Texan voices. Cardona is the 2024-2025 Letras Latinas Poetry Coalition Fellow and currently works as the Marketing Coordinator at Gemini Ink. She moonlights as DJ Mexistentialism.

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes (they/them) is a queer, non-binary, crip/disabled, brown, writer, artist, scholar, educator, cultural worker and creature of the Colombian diaspora. They are author of (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), Ephemeral (Ecotheo Collective, 2024), (Duke University Press, 2025), and Ampersand Organ: a more-than-human lyric anatomy (Milkweed Editions, forthcoming in 2026). Their art, photography, and writing, have been in a number of community art shows including at the National Queer Arts Festival and Rosebud Gallery in San Francisco, the BGSQD in New York City, and exhibitions across Canada, the United States, and Belgium. They are a professor of feminist, queer, and disability studies; and poetry co-editor at . A VONA Alum, and 2023 recipient of the Creative Capital Award, they have received poetry fellowships from Zoeglossia, CantoMundo, Radar Productions, and Yale’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. Their poetry and creative non-fiction have been published in American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Poetry among other places. They live in southern California.

Info: ignacio carvajal is a poet, scholar, and translator. ignacio is the author of the chapbooks allow – a litany – (La Resistencia Press 2021) and Plegarias, and his poems have appeared in places like the Acentos Review and the anthology The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States, among others. ignacio was born in costa rica; they teach Central & Latin American Literature, Latin American Studies and creative writing at the University of California San Diego. 

Info: Cloud Delfina Cardona (she/they) is an artist, writer, and book cover designer from San Antonio, Texas. She is the author of What Remains, winner of the 2020 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, and the past is a jean jacket, winner of the Hub City Press BIPOC Poetry Series. She is the co-founder of Infrarrealista Review, a literary nonprofit that publishes Texan voices. Cardona is the 2024-2025 Letras Latinas Poetry Coalition Fellow and currently works as the Marketing Coordinator at Gemini Ink. She moonlights as DJ Mexistentialism.

Info: heidi andrea restrepo rhodes (they/them) is a queer, non-binary, crip/disabled, brown, writer, artist, scholar, educator, cultural worker and creature of the Colombian diaspora. They are author of The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), Ephemeral (Ecotheo Collective, 2024), Afterlives of Discovery: Speculative Geographies in the Settler Colonial Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2025), and Ampersand Organ: a more-than-human lyric anatomy (Milkweed Editions, forthcoming in 2026). Their art, photography, and writing, have been in a number of community art shows including at the National Queer Arts Festival and Rosebud Gallery in San Francisco, the BGSQD in New York City, and exhibitions across Canada, the United States, and Belgium. They are a professor of feminist, queer, and disability studies; and poetry co-editor at Apogee Journal.

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