local remedies Book Launch: A Poetry Reading & Community Gathering

✦ Host Publications is thrilled to celebrate the launch of Chiagoziem Jideofor's debut poetry collection local remedies! Join us for a celebratory evening featuring poetry readings by Bianca Alyssa Pérez, Malcolm Friend, and Chiagoziem Jideofor; a moderated Q & A session; refreshments, and poetic ecstasy ensue! Hosted by Host Publications editors Annar Veröld-Miranda & Claire Bowman!

Chiagoziem Jideofor’s debut collection, local remedies, dismantles colonial histories and reshapes them. Exploring Igbo stories through memory, myth, and strangeness, Jideofor testifies to the nonlinear experience of trauma. What does it mean to process trauma as the child of parents who survived a war, a genocide? How do inherited wounds emerge unexpectedly in the body, in the mind, in a family? In local remedies, histories are refracted, and like sun through rain, these poems scatter a different light—one which illuminates our shared need for remedies, both old and new.

✦ 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.

✦ This event is supported in part by the City of Austin Economic Development Department.

✦ reader bios ✦

Malcolm Friend is a poet originally from the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle, WA. He is co-editor of the anthology Até Mais: Latinx Futurisms (Deep Vellum, 2024) with Kim Sousa and Alan Chazaro and the author of the chapbook mxd kd mixtape (Glass Poetry, 2017) and the full-length collection Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple (Inlandia Books, 2018). Together with JR Mahung, he is a member of Black Plantains, an Afrocaribbean poetry collective.

Bianca Alyssa Pérez is a poet & educator born and raised in South Texas. Her chapbook, Gemini Gospel, was the winner of Host Publication's Chapbook Contest in Spring 2023. Bianca's debut poetry collection, snake breath, is the winner of Hub City Press' Deep Line Poetry Prize, selected by Jennifer Chang, and will be released Spring 2027.

Chiagoziem Jideofor is Queer and Igbo. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, South Carolina Review, The Lincoln Review, Passages North, Commonwealth’s ADDA, the minnesota review, Sho Poetry Journal, MAYDAY, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Info: Bianca Alyssa Pérez is a poet & educator born and raised in South Texas. Her chapbook, Gemini Gospel, was the winner of Host Publication's Chapbook Contest in Spring 2023. Bianca's debut poetry collection, snake breath, is the winner of Hub City Press' Deep Line Poetry Prize, selected by Jennifer Chang, and will be released Spring 2027.

Info: Malcolm Friend is a poet originally from the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle, WA. He is co-editor of the anthology Até Mais: Latinx Futurisms (Deep Vellum, 2024) with Kim Sousa and Alan Chazaro and the author of the chapbook mxd kd mixtape (Glass Poetry, 2017) and the full-length collection Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple (Inlandia Books, 2018). Together with JR Mahung, he is a member of Black Plantains, an Afrocaribbean poetry collective.

Info: Chiagoziem Jideofor is Queer and Igbo. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, South Carolina Review, The Lincoln Review, Passages North, Commonwealth’s ADDA, the minnesota review, Sho Poetry Journal, MAYDAY, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.

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