Monday, June 22, 2026

Five Chicano and Latinx Writers Come to Vroman’s for an El Martillo Press Reading

A Culture Clash founder and four poets, including Pomona’s second poet laureate, share one Pasadena stage June 26

A founding member of the Chicano performance troupe Culture Clash and four Latinx poets will read from their work June 26 at Vroman’s Bookstore, in an evening staged by the Los Angeles publisher El Martillo Press.

The reading and book signing, set for 7 p.m. at the Pasadena store, brings together a notably broad slate: playwright Herbert Siguenza alongside poets Lorna Dee Cervantes, Paul S. Flores, Sonia Gutiérrez and Ceasar K. Avelar. El Martillo Press, founded in Los Angeles in 2023 by poets Matt Sedillo and David A. Romero, publishes working-class and Latinx writers. “El Martillo” means “the hammer” in Spanish. The store asks that those attending consider buying a book.

The press built a national profile quickly. In its first years it published Flores’ We Still Be: Poems and Performances, which won the American Book Award in 2024. “We want to treat our authors the way we want to be treated,” Romero, the co-founder and editor-in-chief, said in an interview with CALÓ News. Sedillo has favored a shorter phrase for the press’s aim: “El Martillo: the builder of bridges. The destroyer of walls,” he told Cultural Daily.

Each writer arrives with distinct credentials. Siguenza is a founding member of Culture Clash, the satirical troupe established in San Francisco in 1984 that relocated to Los Angeles in 1991. He was recently playwright in residence at the San Diego Repertory Theatre through an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, and his Anthology of Latino Plays was published by El Martillo Press in September 2025.

Cervantes, born in San Francisco and raised in San José, wrote the American Book Award-winning collection Emplumada at 24 and founded MANGO Publications at 20. Gutiérrez, author of Spider Woman / La Mujer Araña, received the Tomás Rivera Book Award in 2021 and an International Latino Book Award in 2022 for her novel Dreaming with Mariposas.

Avelar became the second poet laureate of Pomona in January 2023 and is the author of God of the Air Hose and Other Blue-Collar Poems. He founded the Obsidian Tongues open mic in 2017 at Café con Libros Press in Pomona. “I write exclusively through the sociological lens of a blue-collar worker,” he said in an interview with The Pomonan.

The reading takes place at Vroman’s Bookstore, the Pasadena institution founded in 1894 at 695 E. Colorado Blvd. It begins at 7 p.m. Friday, June 26. Information is available at (626) 449-5320 and on the store’s website.

El Martillo Press will publish Cervantes’ next collection, FIRE: Poems Against Pandemic, this year.

 El Martillo Press Reading — Herbert Siguenza (Culture Clash), Lorna Dee Cervantes, Paul S. Flores, Sonia Gutiérrez, Ceasar K. Avelar | Friday, June 26, 2026, 7:00 p.m. |🔗 https://vromansbookstore.com/event/2026-06-26/el-martillo-press-reading