Virtual Book Launch: Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead by Jen Siraganian

Maker, Mentor, Muse & Alta Mesa Center for the Arts Presents

Virtual Book Launch: Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead by Jen Siraganian
with José Felipe Alvergue, author of en el norte/soy del sur and Derrick Austin, author of This Elegance 
Thursday, October 29th - 7pm PST
Zoom

Join us on Thursday, October 29th at 7pm PST for Jen Siraganian's virtual book launch of her debut collection, Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead. Jen will be joined by poets Derrick Austin and José Felipe Alvergue. 

Jen Siraganian traces a self shaped by history, fragmentation, and memory as she weaves her family’s past in the Middle East with her identity as an Armenian-American woman and mother. Whether portraying a grandparent’s survival during the Armenian Genocide, a father’s childhood in 1940s Palestine, or a son’s birth when “death is a neighbor,” Siraganian’s poems interrogate concepts of home, origins, belonging, and displacement. Using a docupoetic lens, the poet braids narratives with archival photographs and artifacts to chart cycles of cultural and historic erasure while enacting an intertextual conversation with artists of the diaspora, and with art itself. Through poems that seed each other with recurring images of pomegranates, mushrooms, and fire, Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead pushes against annihilation with a voice that resists silence.

About Jen Siraganian 

Jen Siraganian is an Armenian-American writer, former poet laureate of Los Gatos, CA, and author of Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead, which won the 2026 Perugia Press Prize. Her poems have won the New Ohio Review Poetry Prize, and appeared in AGNI, Best New Poets (2016 and 2025), Electric Literature, Poetry Daily, The Rumpus, and Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry. A former managing director of Litquake: San Francisco’s Literary Festival, she is a Lucas Artist Fellow at the Montalvo Arts Center. https://www.jensiraganian.com/

About José Felipe Alvergue

José Felipe Alvergue is the author of five books, most recently purplish: poetry anger publics (2025), an auto-theoretical reflection on politics and the record of human emotions archived in poetry, and en el norte/soy del sur (2026), a collection of sonnet essays reflecting on diaspora and wellbeing. José grew up on the Mexico-US border in South San Diego, and is a proud member of the Salvadoran diaspora. jfalvergue.com

About Derrick Austin

Derrick Austin is the author of three poetry collections: This Elegance (Boa Editions, 2026); Tenderness (Boa Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award; and Trouble the Water (Boa Editions, 2016). Recent honors include a 2026 AICA-USA Art Critic Fellowship and a 2026 Irene Yamamoto Arts Writers Fellowship. He lives in Chicago. Keep in touch with him here and follow him @Paradiselaust on social media.

Maker, Mentor, Muse is a teaching platform founded in 2022 by Mary Volmer, Maw Shein Win, and Dawn Angelicca Barcelona. Hailing from three distinct backgrounds, generations, and spiritual traditions we believe community is essential to building a satisfying and sustainable literary life and that true success requires balancing all three artistic roles: maker, mentor, muse. In collaboration with Alta Mesa Center for the Arts, sponsored by Orinda Community Church, we are building a place where artists embrace practices that honor process, spiritual growth, connection, and ongoing community with other writers.

Art is a spiritual act and a human right.

Alta Mesa Center for the Arts is an interfaith arts and spirituality hub, housed and sponsored by Orinda Community Church. Follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

BIG thanks to our favorite local independent bookstore: