Sesentañera for Serros: Celebrating the Life and Work of Michele Serros

Join us for Sesentañera for Serros, A Celebration of the Life and Work of Michele Serros. Author of Chicana Falsa and How to Be a Chicana Role Model, Michele Serros, was a Gen X poet, performer, rock star role model, and dear friend. Born February 11, 1966, Serros would have been 60 this year, but the world lost her light in January 2015 at the age of 48 due to cancer. We celebrate Serros’ 60th birthday in a way she would have loved with poofy dresses, poetry, stories, music, and laughter.

The event will feature a community of readers, including Steve Abee, Luis Alfaro, Maya Chinchilla, Jesenia Chavez, Consuelo G. Flores, Mona Alvarado Frazier, Maricela J. Becerra García, liz gonzález, Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, Georgina Guzman, Lucy Rodriguez-Hanley, and Joseph Rios.
The evening will be hosted by Luivette Resto and Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo.

DJ Set by Metro Sessions and live music by Necia.

Doors Open: 4:30 PM I Readings: 5:00 PM

About the Authors

Steve Abee is poet and teacher who lives in Los Angeles. Author of several books: Johnny Future, The Bus, Great Balls of Flowers. He seeks the ecstatic in grains of the day. On writing: “I saw the fragility and blessedness of lives and started to come apart in the wonderment of it all so thought I better write stuff down.” liz gonzález, along with Michele Serros and five other writers, founded the ¿Y Qué Más? Chicana Writers Collective in 1992. A 2023 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow, liz is the author of the nonfiction chapbook San Bernardino’s First Our Lady of Guadalupe Church: The First 11 Years (Bamboo Dart Press, forthcoming 2026), and the multigenre book Dancing in the Santa Ana Winds: Poems y Cuentos, New and Selected (Los Nietos Press, 2018). Her writing recently appeared in the exhibit San Bernardino Photography Now: I’m Grateful Thorns Have Roses and in the publications Transformation: A Women Who Submit Anthology, HTI Open Plaza, Air/Light, and Poets & Writers Magazine.

Luis Alfaro is a Chicano playwright, poet & performance artist who has received fellowships from the MacArthur; United States Artists; Ford; Joyce; Mellon foundations, and PEN America, among others. He was the resident artist at Oregon Shakespeare Festival (six seasons); Victory Gardens Theatre (seven seasons); LATC (current); Ojai Playwrights Conference (twenty seasons); and Center Theatre Group (seventeen seasons). His plays have been seen throughout the Americas. He directs the MFA playwriting program at University of Southern California. Luis spent two decades in the Los Angeles Poetry and Performance Art communities. He was once on the board of Beyond Baroque.

Maya Chinchilla is a writer, educator, and author of The Cha Cha Files: A Chapina Poética. A Central American femme, she explores historical memory, heartbreak, and justice through humor and truth-telling. She teaches literature, creative writing, and LGBTQ studies, and works as a facilitator and guest speaker. A recipient of the 2023 Mellon Foundation US Latino Digital Humanities Grant, she maps U.S. Central American family, leadership, and activism. Her writing appears in Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology and Mujeres de Maíz en Movimiento. She co-edited Desde El Epicentro, has been an artist-in-residence at Galería de La Raza and La Peña Cultural Center, and serves as incoming board co-chair of AJAAS.

Jesenia Chavez is a proud Chicanita, poeta, public school teacher, and storyteller. She is inspired by the borderlands, and her parents’ migration to Los Angeles from Chihuahua, México #abolishice. Her poetry collection, This Poem Might Save You (me) published by Alegría Magazine, is a journey through the streets of Los Angeles that explores intersectionality and the rituals of survival; it earned honorable mention from the International Latino Book Awards in 2024. She has an MFA in creative writing from UCR, Palm Desert. Find her crying in public with sunglasses on or online at jeseniachavez.com

Consuelo G. Flores is a Los Angeles-based writer, multidisciplinary artist, and cultural worker best known for her deep involvement in Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) cultural practices, theater, poetry, and community arts education. She has played a significant role in promoting and interpreting Mexican and Chicana/o cultural traditions through both artistic and educational work. Flores is recognized for her writing, poetry, playwriting, and performance work. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Antioch University, Los Angeles. She actively engages in cultural education and community art, especially focused on Día de los Muertos. This includes building altars (ofrendas), writing “Literary Altars,” creating installations, and teaching about the cultural and historical significance of the celebration. Flores has written and directed plays and been involved with theater companies, including producing works at festivals like the Frida Kahlo Theater, Brisk, and Fierce Backbone play festivals. Her play Soul Sacrifice will have a five-week full production run at Casa 0101 in Boyle Heights from May thru June 2026. She’s been published as part of a unique writing collective of women. Their book of threaded poetry An Illegal Feast was published and released in July 2025 through Broadstone Press. Their forthcoming book Carnivores And Other Lovers is scheduled for release in late summer 2026 through the same publisher.

Mona Alvarado Frazier is the author of the award-winning YA novel THE GARDEN OF SECOND CHANCES, which received both Gold and Silver Medals from the 2024 International Latino Book Awards. Her YA historical fiction novel, A BRIDGE HOME (Arte Público Press), received the 2025 Southwest Books of the Year in YA, was a co-winner of the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People, and received Gold and Silver Medals from the 2025 International Latino Book Awards. She is a member of SCBWI, Macondo Writers, and Gozo Writers. Mona co-founded LatinxPitch and is co-leader of the Ventura Co. Chapter of Women Who Submit, which promotes literary diversity and inclusion. She has been part of Women Who Write for 16 years and was a mentee in the Las Musas Latinx children’s literature collective in 2021. You can find her lost in a book or binge-watching K-dramas when she's not exploring new destinations or writing.

Dr. Maricela Becerra García is a professor at California State University, Channel Islands. She holds a PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She teaches courses on contemporary Latin American cultural production, with an emphasis on memory, feminisms, and resistance. Her current research centers on the interdisciplinary analysis of state violence, trauma, and memory in Mexico. Her monograph in progress, “2 de octubre, no se olvida”: (Post)Memories of Mexico ‘68, examines contemporary representations of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre from the perspective of the postmemory generation. Her current project explores the role of social media in the feminist movement in Mexico, particularly the use of hashtags to denounce femicides and digital memory as a form of resistance.

liz gonzález, along with Michele Serros and five other writers, founded the ¿Y Qué Más? Chicana Writers Collective in 1992. A 2023 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow, liz is the author of the nonfiction chapbook San Bernardino’s First Our Lady of Guadalupe Church: The First 11 Years (Bamboo Dart Press, forthcoming 2026), and the multigenre book Dancing in the Santa Ana Winds: Poems y Cuentos, New and Selected (Los Nietos Press, 2018). Her writing recently appeared in the exhibit San Bernardino Photography Now: I’m Grateful Thorns Have Roses and in the publications Transformation: A Women Who Submit Anthology, HTI Open Plaza, Air/Light, and Poets & Writers Magazine.

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez’s first collection of writing is called California Southern: writing from the road, 1992-2025, published by Hinchas de Poesia Press this year. He’s been a reporter at LAist, the NPR affiliate in L.A. since 2000 and co-founded the performance poetry group the Taco Shop Poets in San Diego inn1994.

Lucy Rodriguez-Hanley is a nonfiction writer, filmmaker and mother of two. A Dominicana via Washington Heights residing in Long Beach, California. Her film The Big Deal won an Imagen Award for Best Theatrical Short. She is a Pen America, Tin House, Macondo and VONA fellow. She advocates for representation of BIPOC women and non-binary writers in literary spaces and leads the Long Beach, CA chapter of Women Who Submit. Her work is featured in HarperVia's Somewhere We Are Human, The Latinx Project at NYU and Myriam Gurba’s Tasteful Rude among others. www.lucyrodriguezhanley.com/

Joseph Rios is the former poet laureate of Fresno (2023-25) and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He is the author of Shadowboxing: Poems & Impersonations, winner of the American Book Award. He has been a fellow with Macondo, Canto Mundo, and the Academy of American Poets. He has been featured in Poets and Writers magazine, KVPR, Forum @ KQED, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He lives in Fresno.

About Beyond Baroque

is one of the United States' leading independent Literary | Arts Centers and public spaces dedicated to expanding the public's knowledge of poetry, literature and art through cultural events and community interaction. Founded in 1968 as an experimental literary magazine, Beyond Baroque is based out of the original City Hall building in Venice, California. The Center offers a diverse variety of literary and arts programming including readings and workshops. The building also houses a bookstore with a large collection of new poetry books for sale.

Livestream: If you can’t join us in person the event will be livestreamed on at the scheduled time of the event. If you are tuning in this way, no ticket purchase is necessary.

If you are attending in person, ticket purchase is required. Tickets will be available at the Beyond Baroque bookstore on the day of the event, but we recommend registering in advance through Eventbrite. Masks are encouraged while inside our center. Please arrive early.

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