Poetry Reading: Nancy Miller & Adela Najarro

 

Join us August 8th 3:00-5:00pm for a special afternoon of poetry featuring Santa Cruz County Poet Laureate Nancy Miller Gomez and Award-winning Latinx poet Adela Najarro. If you think poetry isn’t your thing, these two poets will convince you otherwise.

Nancy Miller Gomez 

Nancy’s poetry has been featured in Best American Poetry; Best New Poets and numerous anthologies and journals. She has been awarded an Academy of American Poet’s Laureate Fellowship and received a special mention in the annual Pushcart Prize anthology.

Ellen Bass says Nancy’s poetry is: “a vital voice full of hard-earned compassion and wisdom, mixing memory with ferocity in ways that will make you gasp.” Nancy co-founded an organization that teaches poetry in jails and brings poetry workshops to marginalized youth across the county.

"In Inconsolable Objects, Nancy Miller Gomez writes from within shadow. She writes doubt and exhalation and loss. With an enviable lyrical assurance, she writes brilliantly of the moments we convince ourselves we've forgotten, those wide insistent moments that confound and challenge us as parent, as spouse, as daughter or son, as human. To read this revelatory work is to lose yourself in its muscled melody, its courage, its resounding truths. Inconsolable Objects is a debut that will rattle the rafters." - Patricia Smith

More at: nancymillergomez.com

 

Adela Najarro 

Adela Najarro's fifth poetry collection, Variations in Blue, was published in 2025 by the Letras Latinas/ Red Hen Collaborative. The California Arts Council recognized her as an established artist in the Central California Region and appointed her as an Individual Artist Fellow. Her extended family hails from Nicaragua. She is the Board President for Círculo de Poetas and Writers and works with the Latinx community nationwide, promoting the intersection of creative writing and social justice.

 

There will be wine and refreshments and an opportunity to socialize and engage Nancy and Adela in a Q&A about their writing and their work bringing poetry to marginalized communities.