The University of Arizona Press
Date: Sunday, May 31, 2026
Time: 12:30-1:30 p.m., PDT
Where: Poetry Stage, BART Plaza, 2170 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA
author of Chamorrita Song, will speak at the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley on May 31. She will be part of the panel, “The Future Is Unsettled: Decolonial Poetics” with Jason Bayani, Osmani Ochoa, and Logan Phillips, moderated by Dena Rod. The event is free and open to the public. Danielle P. Williams is a Black and Chamorro poet, translator, essayist, and spoken-word artist from Columbia, South Carolina. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she works as a copywriter and creative strategist.
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.
