HoCoPoLitSo welcomes all to the October edition of the Wilde Readings Series, with Rahne Alexander and Maritza Rivera (or Mariposa), hosted by Linda Joy Burke. For 2024, please join us at our NEW venue, independent bookstore Queen Takes Book on Tuesday, October 8th at 7 p.m., at 6955 Oakland Mills Rd, Suite E, Columbia MD, 21045. Please spread the word— bring your friends, family and students! Light refreshments will be served and books by the readers available for sale.

An open mic follows the featured authors and we encourage you to participate. Please prepare no more than five minutes of performance time, about two poems. Sign up when you arrive, or in advance via this online form.

Below, get to know Rahne and Maritza!

Who is the person in your life (past or present) that shows up most often in your writing?

Rahne: I don’t know if this is for me to say! My recent MFA project was centered on my mother, so the last several years, she’s been the dominant force. In the wake of that project, I’ve been thinking about so many of my mentors, those who nurtured me in some way—materially, culturally, spiritually or otherwise. But over the years I’ve also spent a lot of time and energy writing about jerks. Are any of them the same guy? I’ll never tell.

Maritza: My grandmother, AKA abuela, was a very influential figure in my life and often appears in my work.

Where is your favorite place to write?

Rahne: They used to have these places called cafés where you could sit at a little table and order coffee all day long. Some of them would even be open until midnight! There were a whole bunch of them, each with a different vibe and it was great. You could go there with your little moleskine notebook and look off into the mid-distance, maybe order a little sandwich or a pastry. Then Starbucks came along and now every place closes at 3 p.m.

Maritza: On the beach in Puerto Rico, my happy place.

Do you have any consistent pre-writing rituals?

Rahne: I have a tried and true ritual: I start by checking my to-do calendar so I can remember how much past deadline I am and rekindle how bad I feel about myself. Then I take the empty glasses and plates from my desk to the kitchen where I do some dishes, and the running water makes me need to run to the bathroom, which pressingly needs cleaning and if so I do that too. Since I’m going back downstairs anyway I take a load of laundry to the basement where, what the heck, since I’m down here why not get a load started. Then I go back up to the kitchen where I get that kombucha I drank half of yesterday and return up to my desk, where an email has arrived that I must respond to forthwith, and so I do. Then I’m tired. I go lie down for a moment to rest my strained eyes, but also maybe it’s my turn on my favorite little word game app which is called WELDER, and the cat comes along for a snuggle and she insists I put my phone down to pet her. I doze off for five to thirty minutes and wake with a start — the cat is gone and my phone battery is drained. I plug in my phone, return the warmed kombucha to the fridge and start a coffee to perk me up. While the water boils, I go down to switch over the laundry, bring up a load of clothes from the dryer, and then I’m usually ready to write, immediately after I check Twitter.

Maritza: I don’t really have a ritual except that I write everything by hand first. I then type and edit on the computer. I wrote a poem once about Rita Dove’s ritual but I don’t have one like hers.

Who always gets a first read?

Rahne: It’s usually just me, and in the best of cases, the audience. Since the days of dial-up BBSes through blogging and microblogging to now, I love going direct to the audience. When I hit that sweet spot, the cathexis between performance and writing—for me, that’s where the magic is.

Maritza: My children, Maria Teresa and Antonio Roberto are always the first to read and hear my poetry. They don’t cringe and run away anymore. LOL!

What is a book you’ve read more than twice (and would read again)?

Rahne: I don’t re-read books very often, so it’s funny to be asked that at this moment, in which I’m concurrently re-reading three. I was recently given a 1928 reprint of Dorothy Parker’s Enough Rope so I’ve been spending time with some of my oldest favorite poems; and I’m revisiting Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower because that story began in 2024. I’ve also been re-reading James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work, his memoir of the cinema. It’s among my favorites of his writings.

Maritza: Pinecrest Rest Haven by Grace Cavalieri and Meeting Bone Man by Joseph Ross. Please don’t make me choose.

What is the most memorable reading you have attended?

Rahne: There are so many I could mention here, so I’ll keep to the one that came to mind first, which was seeing Diane DiPrima at Bookshop Santa Cruz circa 2000. She was spectacular, and helped clarify my perspective on the beat poets.

Maritza: When Grace Cavalieri read from Pinecrest Rest Haven at The Writer’s Center, I laughed and cried. It was very emotional for me. This was many years ago but when I think about it, I still feel the impact of her words.

• Rahne Alexander is an intermedia artist and writer from Baltimore, Maryland. She holds an MFA in Intermedia+Digital Arts from UMBC, and her visual and performance works have been exhibited across the U.S. and around the world. Her writing has appeared in BmoreArt, The Hopkins Review and the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica. Her essay chapbook Heretic to Housewife was awarded the 2019 OutWrite nonfiction prize.

Rahne can be found on most social media platforms as @rahnealexander. Her personal website, which is going through some changes as of this writing, is rahne.com, and she publishes a blog called Paradise Is Not For Sale.

• Marita Rivera, AKA Mariposa is a Puerto Rican poet and Army veteran who resides in Rockville, MD and San Juan, PR. She has been writing poetry for over fifty years and is the creator of a short form of poetry called Blackjack. Maritza is the author of About You; A Mother’s War; Baker’s Dozen; Twenty-One: Blackjack Poems and the Blackjack Poetry Playing Cards. Since 2011, she hosts the Mariposa Poetry Retreat and the Mariposa Reunion Reading. Her work appears in literary magazines, online publications, and the public arts project, Meet Me At the Triangles located in Wheaton, MD. In 2022 Maritza and Jeffrey Banks co-edited Diaspora Café: DC, an Afro-LatinX anthology published by Day Eight. In 2023 she translated the poetry collection, Inquilinos Mudos/Silent Tenents by Alberto Roblest from Spanish into English.

Maritza is on Facebook under her name, The Blackjack Poets Group and the Mariposa Poetry Retreat. Poems from A Mother’s War can be found on milspeak.org.