Award-winning poet Tiffany Gonzales will be this week's feature for Wednesday Night Poetry at Kollective Coffee+Tea, 110 Central Ave. The weekly open mic session for all poets will begin at 6:30 p.m. and Gonzales will perform at 7 p.m., followed by another round of open mic. Admission is free and open to all ages.
Gonzales grew up on a farm outside Malvern and moved to Hot Springs in 2003. In 2004, when the oldest of her three children was just an infant, she decided to go to college. "Going to college while raising a family was tough," Gonzales said in a news release. "But it certainly changed my life -- for the better."
She graduated this year on May 13 from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock as a McNair Scholar with a B.A. in Anthropology and a minor in Sign Language Studies. She recently received the Outstanding Senior Award at the McNair Scholars Banquet, and she won the Katherine J. Hardie Memorial Award in Anthropology. Part of her course work involved researching the narratives of exotic dancers. Gonzales plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Anthropology.
Gonzales' poem "Tonight I Long For You" recently received the Equinox Award for excellence in poetry. Her writing has also garnered her a spot at the Juniper Writing Institute this summer at the University Of Massachusetts in Amherst. She has participated at Wednesday Night Poetry since 2000, and she is a regular at Kai Coggin's Words and Wine writing workshops at Emergent Arts.
On Tuesdays from 8-10 a.m. she is the host of Breakfast with Tiffany on Hot Springs' community radio station KUHS 97.9 FM.
Email [email protected] for more information about Wednesday Night Poetry.
Entertainment on 05/30/2017