Tisha Reichle-Aguilera, poet, educator, and author of the YA novel Breaking Pattern, joins Cody Sisco in conversation about rodeo sports, growing up in Southern California, difficult family relationships, and challenging norms and expectations around gender roles and socio-economic status.

Chicana feminist and former rodeo queen, Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera (she/her) writes so the desert landscape of her childhood can be heard as loudly as the urban chaos of her adulthood. She is obsessed with food. A former high school teacher, she earned an MFA at Antioch University Los Angeles and is a PhD candidate at USC. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and featured in Best Small Fictions 2022. Her YA novel, Breaking Pattern, was published by Inlandia Books. She’s a Macondista and works for literary equity through Women Who Submit.

Find out more at http://tishareichle.com/.

Tisha Mentioned These Books

What I’m Currently Reading

Books That Changed My Life

Books That Shaped My Writing Style

Faults by Terri de la Peña

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Why My Books Might Be Banned

We believe in the human right to life, liberty, and security. We believe in the right to asylum. We believe in freedom from arbitrary detention, torture, and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment. We believe in access to justice. 

At a time when political leaders in the United States are negating human rights and leading us into darkness, we believe in the power of stories to create hope, to heal, and to chart paths toward better futures for anyone seeking life, liberty, and security by crossing borders. 

We are gathering book recommendations from authors and advocates who want to share stories of migration and diaspora. Many thanks to Tisha Reichle-Aguilera for bringing the titles listed below to our attention.

Lynne Thompson, Fourth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, joins host Cody Sisco in conversation about her most recent collection of poetry, Blue on a Blue Palette. They discuss taking inspiration from the world, how women are both elevated and denigrated, palm trees, Black lives, poetic forms, and being a good poetry citizen. And Lynne reads three of her poems for us.

Lynne Thompson was the 4th Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles. The daughter of Caribbean immigrants, her poetry collections include Beg No Pardon (2007), winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar (2013), from What Books Press; and Fretwork (2019), winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. Thompson’s honors include the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award (poetry) and the Stephen Dunn Prize for Poetry as well as fellowships from the City of Los Angeles, Vermont Studio Center, and the Summer Literary Series in Kenya. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Poem-A-Day (Academy of American Poets), New England Review, Colorado Review, Pleiades, Ecotone, and Best American Poetry, to name a few.

A lawyer by training, Thompson sits on the boards of the Los Angeles Review of Books and Cave Canem and is the Chair of the Board of Trustees at Scripps College, her alma mater. She facilitates private workshops, most recently for Beyond Baroque, Poetry By the Sea Conference, Moorpark College Writers Festival, and Central Coast Writers’ Conference. Thompson is a native of Los Angeles, California, where she resides.

Find out more: https://www.lynnethompson.us/