PLEASE NOTE:
Sadly, due to poor health, poet-maestro Raul Salinas
is unable to perform and tour with Caliente!

NEW!!

CALIENTE!
Circle around the Sun

Do you like this audio sample?

"Solidarite"
from the CD
"Red Arc"
Click here to order the CD!


Click this photo, to watch a video clip!


featuring:
composer-baritone saxophonist Fred Ho (Chinese American)
and poets
Magdalena Gómez (Nuyorican-Roma) and
Raúl Salinas (Native-Chicano)
was founded in the spring of 2005

MAGDALENA GÓMEZ
poet, playwright, performer and arts educator lives in Springfield, MA. She has performed internationally in a wide spectrum of venues throughout her life: theaters, video, television, bars, clubs, colleges and universities, schools, libraries, basements, prisons, monasteries, outdoor stages, conferences, housing projects, hospitals, community based organizations, ashrams, synagogues, with the occasional spontaneous performances on subways, buses, airports, restaurants and jury pools.

Magdalena Gómez began writing poetry at an early age, and hit the NYC poetry scene while still in high school in 1970, reading in beat venues such as Cafe Wha?, Speakeasy, The Village Gate, The Pit, The Cedar Tavern, Chumley’s, Off the Beat N’ Path (Hoboken), Washington Square Park, in bars, cafe’s, church basements, lofts, often as a featured reader and as part of the open mic scene. Underground poetry matriarch, actor and bike riding Brighton Beach mermaid, Emilie Glenn featured Magdalena in her living room salon readings on the lower East Side and the West Village. Emilie facilitated Magdalena’s first public reading at an all male gay review theater on l4th Street, Dramatis Personae, in Spring, 1970. She’s been a performance poet ever since. Cited as part of the Nuyorican Poets Vanguard by scholar and poet, Louis Reyes Rivera, Magdalena received loving guidance from Louis, Sandra Maria Esteves and Pedro Pietri, but remained an outsider of any poetry “movement”, for which she is grateful. “There still is no box into which I fit, and I like it that way.”

Magdalena has had numerous readings and productions and has won several awards including:
• Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Playwriting Grant,
• National Endowment for the Arts development grant (in collaboration with Enchanted Circle Theater),
• First Place award from Stages Repertory Theater in Texas for a full length play,
• You Don’t Look It and First Place in the West Coast 10-Minute Play contest, for The Andalusian Dream.

Among her more recent work, Lobster Face (or the shame of amanda cockshutt) premiered off-broadway at INTAR 53 last December directed by Daniel Jaquez.


“There are metaphors of beauty and originality...breathtaking...”

~ hailed The NY Times
on Ms. Gomez’s poetic sensibility as a playwright:

"The mark of a great poet is not recorded in the pages of books or
weighed in awards, but left in the people she has changed. The richness
Magdalena brings with her ability to see joy and laughter in places of
darkness, is a message of hope that extends far beyond the confines of
a reading venue. It is something that leaves an everlasting mark on
everything and every one she touches."

~ Leo Hwang-Carlos
Associate Dean of Humanities, Greenfield Community College, MA

Her recent poetry CD, Amaxonica: How ls from the Left Side of MyBody, was released in NYC this past year.

Her solo show Chopping premiered at the 2001 Boston Women on Top Festival with subsequent productions in NYC at the @Here performance space for the Voices from Coconut Hill Festival;
Latina Letters Conference, San Antonio Texas; New WORLD Theater; Smith College; most recently at Springfield College and is still available for touring.


Recent poetry performance venues include the
Brooklyn Academy of Music (with Fred Ho)
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
San Francisco State Poetry Center (CALIENTE!)
Acentos (Bronx);
Hunter College
Jake’s Saloon in El Barrio
Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD!)
Hostos Community College, also in the Bronx.


Magdalena is currently developing a new multi-media performance work with Director Daniel Jaquez and composer Aib Gomez-Delgado (Zemog, Jayuya). She hopes to join the Brooklyn Sax Quartet in the near future and is seeking funding for their music with text collaboration. Magdalena is a workshop facilitator for the Women of Color Leadership Network (at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and a consultant with SMART Schools based at the Education Development Center in Newton, MA.

Visit her website at: www.amaxonica.com

• • •

Fred Ho
has won numerous awards and major recognitions internationally.
In 1988 he was the youngest and first Asian American to receive the Duke Ellington Distinguished Artist Lifetime Achievement Award from the 17th annual Black Musicians Conference.
In 1996 he and co-editor Ron Sakolsky won an American Book Award for their anthology Sounding Off! Music As Resistance/Rebellion/Revolution.
Fred Ho is the editor of the ground breaking collection, LEGACY TO LIBERATION: POLITICS AND CULTURE OF REVOLUTIONARY ASIAN PACIFIC AMERICA. His current books include: AFRO/ASIA: REVOLUTIONARY CONNECTIONS BETWEEN AFRICAN AND ASIAN AMERICANS (Duke University Press) co-edited with Bill Mullen; NAKED THEORY/WICKED PRACTICE: COLLECTED WRITINGS ON POLITICAL AND CULTURAL THEORY BY FRED HO (University of Minnesota Press); and THE SLANTED VAGINA MONOLOGUES: An anthology of radical, transgressive and revolutionary writings by Asian Pacific Women of the Americas from Alaska to Argentina.

Fred Ho is a former construction worker and retired hand to hand combat specialist trained in stealth assault techniques and strategic special operations leadership.

“It’s not every day that you run into a musician who joins a protean range of talents—as a composer, saxophonist, writer and bandleader—with a commitment to Marxist ideology.”

~ The New Yorker

“The term genius means little once it’s applied not only to gifted performance artists but also to a truckload of ostentatious oddballs and social-cause fashion plates. No superlative is credible after it’s prostituted into inanity. Still, every once in a blue moon, someone actually fills the bill…[Fred Ho] evincing firebrand artistry…clarity of thought and expression…expansive scope…stand[s] at the forefront of the genre as a genuine trail-blazer…”

~ Dwight Hobbes, Insight News (Minneapolis-St. Paul)

RAÚL R. SALINAS
THE COCKROACH POET

raúlrsalinas is a literary luminary who has shared podiums and microphones with giants such as Miguel Piñero, Pedro Pietri, Wanda Coleman, Joy Harjo, Magdalena Gomez, John Trudell, Jose Montoya, Carmen Tafolla and Ernesto Cardenal among many others, Salinas has also been a tireless crusader for human rights and social justice, as reflected in his work with the Amerian Indian Movement and the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee and his writing clinics for at-risk youth in countless juvenile detention facilties and community centers nationwide.

Author of three poetry collections:
Viaje/Trip (chapbook)
East of the Freeway
Un Trip Through The Mind Jail

plus the forthcoming:
Indio Trails: A Xicano Odyssey through Indian Country (Wings Press)

as well as two spoken word CDs:
Los Many Mundos of raúlrsalinas: Un Poetic Jazz Viaje con Friends (Calaca Press/Red Salmon Press)
Beyond the BEATen Path (Red Salmon Press).

His literary work has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals.
He is also an adjunct professor at St. Edwards University, Austin, Texas.
In 2002, raúlrsalinas was the recipient of the Louis Reyes Rivera Lifetime Achievement Award presented on behalf of La Causa student group at Amherst College, Mass. and The Dark Souls Collective.

In March of 2003, he was honored with the Martin Luther, Jr., César Chavez, Rosa Parks Visiting Professorship Award given by the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Born in Texas on March 17th, 1934, raúlrsalinas is one of the few remaining poetic voices from a special circle of writers that includes Jose Antonio Burciaga, Ricardo Sanchez, Piñero and the recently passed Pietri. A people’s poet who has dubbed himself, effacingly, the “cockroach poet,” Salinas has traveled the globe as a representative of indigenous philosophies and revolutionary-humanist ideologies. Through it all he has remained faithful to the word as a curative, a restorative magic to be used for healing and redemption.

For the last several decades he has mentored aspiring writers, both in and out of his humble shop in Austin, Texas, Resistence Bookstore.

~ Edited from an article by Alejo Sierra

Visit raúl's website: www.raulrsalinas.com