This glossary evolved out of a writing activity in our Chicanx Literature class (CLS 4020) at California State University, Los Angeles in the spring of 2021. The assignment was to celebrate the mighty lengua and produce vignettes about cultural expressions we grew up with. The entries that follow are short excerpts from longer vignettes.

CPAL (AKA Covid-19 Temporary Paid Administrative Leave) lived a very brief tumultuous life in the California State University system. Full of promise and unfulfilled potential, CPAL came into existence as an emergency relief program in the spring of 2020.

This creative essay was inspired by Jane Harty’s Academe Blog post “Stress and PTSD in the Academy” and modeled after Judy Brady’s 1971 satirical feminist essay “I Want a Wife.”

It’s true. I have spent the last semester torturing a wonderful group of students at Cal State LA with cardboard and paper lunch bags.

The Rural Libraries Tour is a result of a seventeen-year partnership between Poets & Writers’ Readings & Workshops program and the California Center for the Book (CalBook), which sends writers into rural and underserved areas of California to teach creative writing workshops in libraries or at venues promoted by the libraries.

In the week following the election, in an attempt to acknowledge and help dismantle (perhaps transform) some of my students’ fears, I facilitated a writing activity between 50 Cal State LA students and 50 fifth graders. It was an unplanned activity thrown together at the last minute, born out of necessity and executed in 3 days.

Poet Olga Garcia, author of Falling Angels: Cuentos y Poemas and the chapbook Lovely Little Creatures, blogs about her experience facilitating a P&W-supported workshop at Southwest Bakersfield Library in Bakersfield, California.

Poet Olga Garcia, author of Falling Angels: Cuentos y Poemas and the chapbook Lovely Little Creatures, blogs about her experience facilitating a P&W-supported workshop with young Latina women.

Poet Olga Garcia, author of Falling Angels: Cuentos y Poemas and the chapbook Lovely Little Creatures, blogs about her experience facilitating the P&W-supported workshop at Robidoux Library in Riverside, California, during May 2011.

For the month of July, poet Olga Garcia, author of Falling Angels: Cuentos y Poemas, blogs about her experience facilitating poetry workshops as a longtime P&W-supported writer.