Prairie Lights

Translator Wendy Call will read from How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems, by Mexican-Zoque poet Mikeas Sánchez.

“In a fiercely personal yet authoritative voice, prolific contemporary poet Mikeas Sánchez articulates the worldview of the Zoque people of southern Mexico. Her paced, steely lyrics fuse cosmology, lineage, feminism, and environmental activism into a singular body of work that stands for the self and the collective in the same instant.”

Wendy Call is author of the award-winning nonfiction book No Word for Welcome. She is co-editor of the craft anthology Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide and the new, annual Best Literary Translations anthology. She is the translator of three collections of poetry by Indigenous Mexican poets. She is a Winter 2023 fellow at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and Fall 2023 Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell College and Translator in Residence at the University of Iowa. Working as an editor and educator, Wendy lives in Seattle, on Duwamish land, and in Oaxaca, on Mixtec and Zapotec land.