Capital City Arts Initiative

As part of National Poetry Month, the Capital City Arts Initiative [CCAI] invites you to attend a reading and writing workshop with poet and writer Ismael García Santillanes at the BRIC, 108 E Proctor Street, Carson City. The writing workshop will take place Tuesday, April 8 from 4–5:30pm; the reading follows immediately at 5:30pm. The free events are part of CCAI’s Books & Writers series co-sponsored with the Carson City Library. CCAI and the Library enthusiastically invite all readers and writers to attend the workshop and reading.

Mr. Santillanes recently finished a book of poetry, Indelicate Angels, being published by the University of Nevada, Reno’s Black Rock Press. The release date is April 2014.

Mr. Santillanes now lives back in the small, agricultural town, Mecca, California, where he spent many of his formative years. This is where he learned to look upon seemingly lifeless land with wonderment. Yet life is a matter of degrees, like seed catching in the split bark of dried up mesquite, or sweat dripped onto the skin of that seed. This is the xeric mind of the desert, where not much is needed to fulfill the promise of breath and brevity. And so, he writes always from the heart desert sand carved.

Ismael Santillanes has had his work published in Western Nevada College’s [WNC] Bristlecone, Collages & Bricolages in Pennsylvania, Goatfoot Press in Oregon, and in the Talking River Review, Idaho among others. Sierra Arts Foundation awarded him a Literary Fellowship Grant in 2008. He earned an AAS from WNC in 2007 and is currently attending Grand Canyon University studying for a Psychology degree.

The Capital City Arts Initiative is an artist-centered organization committed to the encouragement and support of artists and the arts and culture of Carson City and the surrounding region. The Initiative is committed to community building for the area’s diverse adult and youth populations through art projects and exhibitions, live events, arts education programs, artist residencies, and online projects.

A Nevada Arts Council Artist Residency Express Grant partially funded this project. CCAI is funded in part by the John Ben Snow Memorial Trust, City of Carson City, Nevada Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities, U.S. Bank Foundation, and the John and Grace Naumann Foundation.