Murmuration Archives: An Evening with Felicia Zamora

In her bold new collection, Murmuration Archives, Felicia Zamora traverses overlapping orbits of an ancient Mesoamerican codex, lineage, and her stage two breast cancer treatment. “Desire brought me here,” the voice confesses while studying the Codex Yoalli Ehēcatl, one of the only pre-Columbian texts to survive the Spanish colonization of Mexico. Through interactions with the Codex, Zamora’s “undulations” emerge— preverbal, more-than-verbal, urges and responses to the document, while also undergoing surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. Spanning Chichén Itzá to the Vatican Apostolic Library, to the Popol Vuh, to the exam room, to the Tōnalpōhualli, to the infusion center, to Xibalbá, these poems attune to the ancestral, ontological, anatomical, and environmental gaps left in the wake of violence, to create imaginative bridges of homecoming, belonging, and futurity that wormhole centuries together in a present pulse. Zamora’s poetry reminds us that the body is the first archive, as she melds the rawness of cancer with the empowerment of finding the self in the voices of the ancestors. Docupoems reveal the body as a site of channeling, site of liberation, and site of occupancy where ruins, joy, lineage, illegibility, grief, and disease live restlessly intertwined. “Reminders how the body sings despite.” Murmuration Archives is a love poem to descendants of ancient Mesoamerica and cancer survivors—illuminating the primordial collective inside each of us.

6 pm reception/6:30 pm program
Free & open to the public. Registration required.

Copies of Murmuration Archives will be available for sale & signing.

About Felicia Zamora

Felicia Zamora is the author of eight books of poetry including Murmuration Archives (Akrilica Series, Noemi Press 2026), Interstitial Archaeology (Wisconsin Poetry Series 2025), I Always Carry My Bones (2021) winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the Ohioana Book Award in poetry, and Body of Render (2020) winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award. She’s won the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, C.P. Cavafy Prize, Tomaž Šalamun Prize, Wabash Prize, and two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards as well as received fellowships and residencies from CantoMundo, Ragdale Foundation, Tin House, and Yaddo. Her writing appears in Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Alaska Quarterly Review, The American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2022, Boston Review,Brevity, Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Lit Hub, The Missouri Review, Orion, Ploughshares, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, Virginia Quarterly Review, and others. She is a poetry editor for Colorado Review, a contributing editor for West Branch, and an associate professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati where she was a 2025-2026 Taft Research Center Fellow.

About Felicia Denaud

Felicia Denaud is a writer + professor + poet seeking the ends of empire, hierarchy, and
accumulation by elimination as we know them. Against the master perspective, Denaud (aka
f_bottt/fallen gene/bitter crop) claims a framing power derived from the anti-norm’s point of
view. She is currently writing Autonomous Frame: Views from the Black Revolution, a statement against
human enclosure that declares the last in this world shall be first in the next!

About Julia Orquera Bianco

Julia Orquera Bianco is an Argentinian artist and ecologist based in Cincinnati, Ohio. She earned a
BFA from Universidad del Museo Social Argentino in 2012. In 2018 she graduated from the MFA
program at Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Bianco
earned a Certificate on Sustainability from UCLA in 2020, was an intern in the Medicinal Plant
Conservation Program at United Plant Savers in 2022 and earned a Certificate in Permaculture
Design from Cincinnati Permaculture Institute in 2023. Since 2024, Bianco is a student of Shipibo
Maestra Estela Pangoza, traveling to the Peruvian Amazon regularly to study the medicinal Plants of
the rainforest.

Julia Orquera Bianco’s practice challenges static ideas of belonging by using her family and cultural
heritage, her research on Andean-Amazonian cosmovision, and her work with plants of South and
North America. Her work reflects on the changing nature of identity and belonging and their
entanglement with the past, the present, and the place. She uses her family legacy of labor, craft,
music, and storytelling as strategies of home-building, experiencing while remembering.