SWWIM Poetry: Hua Xi & Special Guests

Join us for a poetry reading and conversation with Hua Xi and local writers Carolina Hospital, Nicole Hospital-Medina, and Holly Iglesias at The Betsy-South Beach Library. Hosted by SWWIM as part of an ongoing series.

ABOUT HUA XI: Hua Xi (she/they) is a poet and artist. They are currently a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. Their poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry Daily and elsewhere.

ABOUT CAROLINA HOSPITAL: Carolina Hospital’s poetry collections include Key West Nights and Other Aftershocks (Anhinga Press) and The Child of Exile: A Poetry Memoir (Arte Público Press), as well as Myth America and How to Get into Trouble (Anhinga Press), both collaborative collections with Maureen Seaton, Holly Iglesias, and Nicole Hospital-Medina; plus, the novel A Little Love, under the pen name C. C. Medina (Warner Books). She also collaborated with South Florida writers on the New York Times bestselling novel Naked Came the Manatee. Her work has appeared in publications such as the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature; Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Occupy the Workplace; and Rumors Secrets and Lies: Narrative Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. Her new poetry collection All Roads Lead to Here is forthcoming in August 2025 (Redacted Books , ELJ Editions).

ABOUT NICOLE HOSPITAL-MEDINA: Cuban-American writer and educator, Nicole Hospital-Medina earned her MFA at the University of Miami where she now instructs writing. She is a poet-activist and a multi-faceted individual, serving as a voice for the neurodivergent community through her literary and artistic contributions. Her poems can be read in the anthologies, Poems from the Lockdown, Feminine Rising: Voices of Power and Invisibility, Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, as well as in The Miami Herald, Paper Nautilus, Blunderbuss Magazine, The Acentos Review, and more. She is the inaugural winner of the Miami Herald O’Miami Haiku contest. Her paintings have been featured in Linden Lane Magazine. She released a collaborative chapbook, Myth America, working with poets, Carolina Hospital, Holly Iglesias and Maureen Seaton. The cover features one of her paintings, “In My Apartment. ” She continues to collaborate with this team, showcasing her work in their most recent collection from Anhinga Press, How to Get Into Trouble. Independently, she is celebrating the publication of the preliminary edition of her textbook, Rhetorical Innovation with AI Integration (Cognella Press).

ABOUT HOLLY IGLESIAS: Holly Iglesias’ work includes three books of poetry— Sleeping Things, Angles of Approach, and Souvenirs of a Shrunken World—a critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry, and two collaborative chapbooks, Myth America and How to Get Into Trouble.  She has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She taught at the University of North Carolina-Asheville and at the University of Miami, where her favorite classes were History as an Act of the Imagination and Documentary Poetics. Her current project is Theories of Flight, an intergenerational memoir in prose fragments.

Host or Publisher The Betsy Hotel