Bluffton University hosted its 36th annual English Festival, an event that normally sees local high school as well as Bluffton students and faculty attending various literary-based activities, including a forum and reading with a featured author. The cancellation of school due to poor road conditions in the region prevented most high schools who planned to participate from attending.
This year’s author was Eloisa Amezcua, a poet from Arizona, who has her bachelor’s degree in English from the University of San Diego and a MFA from Emerson College.
Her most recent poetry book “From the Inside Quietly” was the inaugural winner of the Shelterbelt Poetry Prize in 2017.
Before this, Amezcua wrote three chapbooks: “On Not Screaming,” “Symptoms of Teething” and “Mexicamericana.”
She also has a second collection of poetry that will be published through Coffee House Press titled “Fighting Is Like a Wife.”
Outside of creatively writing herself, Amezcua is an editor-in-chief for the journal “The Shallow Ends: A Journal of Poetry,” an associate poetry editor at Honeysuckle Press, as well as the founder of Costura Creative, a talent agency that helps poets and writers set up speaking events alongside workshops and readings.
While at Bluffton, Amezcua held a Forum at 11 a.m., as well as a workshop at 2:30 p.m. with the creative writing poetry class and a reading at 4 p.m. where she read some poems out of her poetry collections.
She said her favorite part of the day was sitting in with the creative writing poetry class as she loved hearing students’ work as well as the openness of everyone in their sharing of poetry.
When aspiring to be a writer, Amezcua recommended a quick math equation to help someone improve as a writer: 80% reading + 10% writing + 10% editing.
For more information on Amezcua, you can visit her website at http://www.eloisaamezcua.com/
A reading of her poem “Teaching My Mother English over the Phone” through Ours Poetica can be seen here:
