Palabras Literary Salon (January 2026 edition)

Come enjoy an afternoon with Palabras Literary Salon, a BIPOC-centered literary community event with host Jen Cheng in Chinatown Los Angeles.

Our January edition features Danielle P. Williams to celebrate her new poetry book from Arizona Press, CHAMORRITA SONG, and other writing. Our event has a guest readers circle, a curated invited list of diverse BIPOC poets, writers, playwrights, and creators to read 3-minutes of writing to celebrate this salon's theme of "gospel." All are welcome to attend - especially bring your allies and others curious to hear BIPOC voices.

As Williams describes the theme:
"Gospel" evokes the sacred power of sound to carry memory, testimony, and transformation, honoring the ways our voices enact praise, lament, and resilience.

Our guest readers circle includes award-winning poets and writers Jen Cheng, Jose Enrique Medina, and others TBA. Light reception is provided (vegetarian and vegan friendly).

• This event is volunteer-run and grassroots-driven.
• Please kindly help us with your early RSVP here to attend and join in the facilitated discussion. Previous events have sold out so please join the waitlist if the RSVPs are full - people do cancel! We are asking for RSVPs for priority entry due to limited capacity.
• Everyone is welcome. Drop-ins are welcome.
• Your donations help us get a headcount and pay for event costs. If you would like to bring cash donation to our event or send other payment, we gladly appreciate your support. *If you're challenged with limited funds and want to attend, please RSVP and join us.
• Please arrive by 1:45pm as we would like to start at 2pm and finish by 3:30pm to have time for community conversation and reception.
• Please budget for time to get your street parking in the neighborhood. There is a $5 parking lot across the street on Broadway at Mandarin Plaza and other neighborhood lots.
• Books are for sale after the event. Please support our authors.

We are glad to have you celebrate with us on Sunday, January 25, 2026 at 2pm at not there gallery in Chinatown (437 Ging Ling Way, Los Angeles, CA 90012).

>>> If the "Donate at the Event" tix are sold out, please select the other tix and you can donate as little as $1 to get a tix. This mechanism was created to limit the number of no-shows and so we can get an accurate number for our chair rentals and reception food.

More about Palabras Literary Salon

With a mission to create intercultural community building, Jen Cheng founded Palabras Literary Salon , inspired by our elders of civil rights consciousness raising and Maya Angelou's salons in the Harlem Renaissance. As a facilitator, Jen Cheng, brings home-cooking and light snacks to the event as we build bridges by breaking bread together. We sit in a non-heirarchical circle, without a stage. This is not an open-mic. Talk-story and witnessing are ways we can build better understanding of our humanity. More about Palabras on Jen's website: www.jencvoice.com/palabras

More about our featured writer

DANIELLE P. WILLIAMS is a Black and Chamorro poet, translator, essayist, and spoken-word artist from Columbia, South Carolina, who believes in the power words have to inspire, educate, and enact change.

More about the book

For poet and spoken-word artist Danielle P. Williams, Kantan Chamorrita is more than just the ancient craft of Chamorro folk song. It is also a return and a homecoming. This impromptu style of communal call-and-response performance art forms the spokes for Williams’s debut collection. Rooted in oral tradition, Chamorrita Song pays homage to Black and Chamorro cultures, honoring the artistic expressions that these communities have created to reconcile lifetimes of imposed trauma. Bearing witness to these many narratives, Williams intertwines spoken word poetry and gospel music with Chamorro storytelling, weaving together the nuanced histories of queer, Black, and Indigenous existence and literature. Here Williams reveals capacious contemporary forms that speak to the future as well as to the past and that further ground lineages in homelands, finding strength and beauty in collective pain and triumph. These poems transform and spread the messages of those long silenced. They act as song and prayer.

===

Graphic: @JenCvoice

Group photo is from July 2024 edition of Palabras Literary Salon . Event graphics by Jen Cheng.