Picked for you from the audio garden

[link to transcript]

s4e21
June 25, 2026

Welcome to the Listen & Be Heard Hour Summer Remix Season! Summer Remix 2 is a special blend picked from the audio garden and remixed by Hernán Ramiro for your listening pleasure. We hope that you will listen, move, laugh, cry and be heard!

Featured in the remix: Eileen Tabios, Martha Cinader, Hernán Ramiro reads Henry Dumas, Dorsía Smith Silva, Latasha Natasha Diggs, Mary Oishi, Wordslanger, Brian Kimmel, Judy Talaugon, Jen Soriano

Brian Kimmel is a multiheritage Indonesian American, and grandchild to Pacific Northwest author, Martha Walandouw Lohn. He co-authored Lohn’s memoir, Blue Skies, Troubled Waters, and edited the first Indonesian language version. A poet, memoirist, lyricist, composer, musician, and scholar-practitioner, Kimmel guest lectures and recitals internationally on narrative technologies and the expressive arts.

Dorsía Smith Silva is the author of In Inheritance of Drowning (CavanKerry, 2024), which was a finalist for the Whirling Prize and reviewed by Publishers Weekly. She is a multi-nominated Pushcart Prize nominee, Best of the Net finalist, Best New Poets nominee, Cave Canem Poetry Prize Semifinalist, Poetry Editor at The Hopper, and Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras.

Hernán Ramiro Rodriguez Sierra – Musician, Composer, Producer

Lan Duong is Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism and coeditor of Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora: Troubling Borders in Literature and Art. Her poetry has appeared in Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, Bold Words: Asian American Writing to Span the Centuries and Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing.

Judy Talaugon is a Chumash and Filipina Land Protector from the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians. She is the daughter of farmworkers and immigrant leaders. Growing up among Mexican and Filipina communities in California, she has been a long-time activist in numerous struggles, ranging from human rights to housing, land rights, and the fight against white supremacy.

Martha Cinader is a poet and author living in Harlem, NY. Her young adult novel, Marq and the Queen Fish, is forthcoming in 2026 from Atmosphere Press. Cinader is the founder and Director of the Listen & Be Heard Network, where she hosts and produces The Listen & Be Heard Hour, and Beyond Borders, both non-commercial podcasts and syndicated radio shows on the Pacifica Affiliate Network. 

Mary Oishi was the child of an American soldier and a Japanese bride from World War II. She grew up with her father’s relatives in a white supremacist enclave in rural Pennsylvania until finally reuniting with her mother in 1987. Since arriving in Albuquerque in 1999, she has performed and published poetry “in the spirit of changing the world through the power of art.” Besides her print and Internet publications, she has published a chapbook, Naked without Shame, in 1988, and a poetry CD, kiss the world awake, in 2004. She hosts The Blues Show on KUNM, 89.9 FM in

MOSAB ABU TOHA is a Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist from Gaza. His first collection of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and won the Palestine Book Award, the American Book Award, and the Walcott Poetry Prize. Abu Toha is also the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award for his “Letter from Gaza” columns for The New Yorker.

Zakiyyah’s creative journey began as a child when, at the age of three, she won her school’s Valentine’s Day Poetry Contest. Early exposure to the arts through Mount Vernon’s Creative Arts Program allowed her to act in plays alongside talented peers, including saxophonist Michael Philips. Outside the program, she trained under Tina Satin—who also taught Sidney Poitier and Denzel Washington

Existing in the liminal space of sound of spoken word and music, Sista Zock introduces a unique Afro Jazz Fusion Sound with a touch of Hip-hop. Her latest project, Zock Solid, Where the Stem Meets the Root, features a collaboration with Abiodun of The Last Poets, adding depth and resonance to her musical journey.

Tribunal Rising commemorates the 1992 International Tribunal movement in the city of San Francisco to dismantle the legacy of Christopher Columbus and the Myth of Discovery. In 1990, “[a]t the culmination of the Special International Tribunal on the Human Rights Violations of Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War in the US, the American Indian Movement extended a call to national liberation movements and anti-imperialist allies, united by a shared vision of justice and equality. This vision emerged from a deep-seated commitment to human dignity and the elimination of age-old practices that perpetuate hatred and inflict both psychological and physical harm.”…

In this striking debut, Dorsía Smith Silva explores the devastating effects of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico, highlighting the natural world, the lasting impact of hurricanes, and the marginalization of Puerto Ricans. These poems also focus on the multiple sites of oppression in the United States, especially the racial, social, and political injustices that occur every day.

The Balikbayan Artist– inspired by and dedicated to Venancio C. Igarta (1912- 2000), the real-life leading artist of the Manong Generation–

Blue Skies, Troubled Waters, tells the story of twin sisters Ath and Kath, born in New Jersey, in 1933, whose family is deported to the Indonesia due to their father’s undocumented status. Their new life is shattered when, in 1941, Japan invades, and the family is imprisoned.

Living It! is Martha Cinader’s debut as the producer of her own album, and features an eclectic array of arrangements and musical styles. It was recorded in part in a studio in New York City, part in a studio in Hamburg, and part live at the Mojo Club in Hamburg, throw in some bonus tracks recorded live at WBAI Radio in New York, and a superb mastering session with Ralph “Pinguin” Kessler in Hamburg, and you get fourteen tracks! Cinader brings together the collective talents of Sabine Worthmann, who uses here sfx pedals generously with her accoustic bass and an…

“A powerful, capacious, and profound” (Ocean Vuong) new collection of poems about life in Gaza by an award-winning Palestinian poet. Barely thirty years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current siege of Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed and destroyed his house, pulverizing a library he had painstakingly built for community use, he and his family fled for their safety. Not for the first time in their lives.

Eileen R. Tabios says, “Poetry is a decolonized language.” She proves it through her autobiography that begins with her first book that she wrote as a 2-3-year-old toddler and focuses on her poetry inventions: the hay(na)ku, the Murder Death Resurrection Poetry Generator, and the Flooid. This is a unique and thought-provoking autobiography by a poet who claims poetry is not words.

Written by the “pandemic poet laureate” of Albuquerque, Sidewalk Cruiseship draws on Oishi’s remarkable ability to illustrate the world around her and the people in it. Separated into eleven short sections by traditional Japanese tankas, the poems in Oishi’s newest collection take on the macro and the micro. They respond to the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the contentious political climate as they draw readers in to witness intimate moments of people and scenes within Oishi’s beloved city of Albuquerque. The poems explore such themes as mental illness, the joys and sorrows of motherhood, what it is to be a woman…

In propulsive and formally inventive verse, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs examines how trauma reshapes lineage, language, and choice, disrupting attempts at reconciliation across generations. Questioning who is deemed worthy of public memorialization, Diggs raises new monuments, tears down classist tropes, offers detailed instructions for her own international funeral celebrations, and makes visible the hidden labors of care and place. From corners in Harlem through North Carolina back roads, Diggs complicates the concept of “survivor,” getting to the truth of living in the dystopia of poverty.

This book is a vessel/holding liquid for thirsty desirers/in the empty spiral of the universe/where detail is opinion/one moment is all it takes to answer/when the body calls. This book is just one answer in a life of calling. The storyteller lives inside the breath of home. Whatever home is chosen, whatever breath is owned. The desirer takes the moment we’re in and stretches out its every wrinkle. In the folds are new horizons, exploding the every day, line by line-inwards, so the shards are sort of slo-mo in their entry into gravity…We’re brought into the world of the writer.…

A collection of biographical stories and poems about fascinating people in history whose real dreams made a real difference. Developed in performance, these stories bring old tales to life for contemporary readers in a way that is both entertaining and informative.

Activist Jen Soriano brings to light the lingering impacts of transgenerational trauma and uses science, history, and family stories to flow toward transformation in this powerful collection that brings together the lyric storytelling, cultural exploration, and thoughtful analysis of The Argonauts, The Woman Warrior, What My Bones Know, and Minor Feelings.

CREDITS– CO-HOSTS & PRODUCERS: Martha Cinader, Hernán Ramiro Rodriguez Sierra, Tony Robles. FEATURED GUESTS: Eileen Tabios, Martha Cinader, Hernán Ramiro reads Henry Dumas, Dorsía Smith Silva, Latasha Natasha Diggs, Mary Oishi, Wordslanger, Brian Kimmel, Judy Talaugon, Jen Soriano, Sandra Esteves SOUNDTRACK, MIXING, MASTERING, SOUND DESIGN: Hernán Ramiro Rodriguez Sierra. Executive Producer, Martha Cinader.

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