To kick off Women’s History Month, the Arts and Literature Lab is hosting a “Nasty Women” poetry reading event on Saturday, March 18, to benefit Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin. Today we feature two poets: Dana Maya, and Cindy Carlson.

Dana Maya is from the Mexican diaspora by way of Colorado. She did graduate studies in US minority literature, Chican@ literature and culture, and queer theory. She’s been published in Feminist Formations, Volta, the anthologies Listen to Your Mother, and Basta: 100+ Latinas against Gender Violence, and is active in public writing projects such as the Spontaneous Writing Booth in Madison. Her work has examined the dynamics of marginality and exclusion in race, gender, sexuality, mental illness, and, in a piece written for Planned Parenthood, abortion and mothering.

Cindy Carlson, born in the U.P., began writing poems on birch trees. She now lives, teaches, writes, and sings in her band Linda, in Madison, WI. Her work has appeared in Sentence, Shampoo, Bloom, The Madison Review, Transom, among other fine literary journals. Her chapbook Queering was finalist for the Gertrude prize. Her book backwards rapture was finalist for the Sarabande prize. She received her BA from UW Madison and her MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.