Ellen Carol DuBois returns to Buffalo to talk about her new book on Elizabeth Cady Stanton, plus a bilingual poetry reading with Santiago Acosta and Diego Espiritu at Burning Books.


Wednesday, March 4, 7:30 p.m.: CFI Literary Café Series reading hosted by poet Ryki Zuckerman and featuring poets Carol Mikoda and Ruth Robson. Center for Inquiry, 1310 Sweet Home Rd., Amherst. Free and open to the public.

Thursday, March 5, 6:30 p.m.: Bilingual Poetry Reading featuring Santiago Acosta and Diego Espiritu. Burning Books, 420 Connecticut St., Buffalo. Free and open to the public.

About the poets:

Santiago Acosta is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. He works on modern and contemporary Latin American literature and visual arts, with a focus on cultural responses to extractivism, petroleum economies, and environmental crisis. His research combines approaches from cultural studies, political economy, and environmental theory.

His book manuscript, We Are Like Oil: An Ecology of the Venezuelan Culture Boom, explores how literature and the visual arts interacted with the environmental transformations of the 1970s oil boom in Venezuela. He is also co-editor of the volume Ecopoéticas y políticas ecológicas desde Abya Yala (forthcoming from Brill). From 2021 to 2023, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at SUNY Old Westbury, where he helped launch the college’s Environmental Studies program. At Yale, Acosta is a member of the Environmental Humanities Steering Committee and serves on the faculty board at The Creative Forum.

Acosta is also an award-winning poet. His collection El próximo desierto (The Coming Desert) won the José Emilio Pacheco Literature Prize “City and Nature,” awarded by the Guadalajara International Book Fair and Guadalajara’s Museum of Environmental Sciences. His selected poems appeared in 2024 with Visor Libros under the title La desesperanza (Hopelessness). He has received support from the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program and was an invited poet at the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP26. While in Caracas, he co-founded the poetry journal El Salmón, which won a National Book Award.

Diego Espíritu Chávez holds a Philosophy degree from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and is a member of UNAM’s research and creation collective Arte+Ciencia. His work appears in Líneas en tierra. A Collection of Mexican Poems (Australian Poetry, 2019) and multiple editions of San Diego Annual Poetry. In 2022, he presented the lecture “Máquinas post_concretas: hacia una cartografía afectiva desde el arte con máquina de escribir” at the online conference Expanded Poetry: The Poetics and Politics of Repetition hosted by the Instituto de Literatura Comparada Margarida Losa at the University of Porto. He teaches the expanded literature course Máquinas Post-Concretas on typewriter art, visual, and concrete poetry. In 2021, he joined the interdisciplinary arts program LIMINAL at CEIIDA, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León. He is the author of Poemas Panks para community managers (Argentina: Santos Locos, 2016; México: Mantarraya, 2017) and the strange blue incandescence of mites (Paris: .able, 2024; Mexico: Imaginaria, 2023). Currently, he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Spanish Language and Literature at the University at Buffalo, focusing on poetics and visual writing.

Friday, March 6, 4 p.m.: Book talk by Ellen Carol DuBois in conjunction with the publication of her new book, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life (Basic Books). Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center Cinema, 341 Delaware Ave., Buffalo, NY 14202.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a pioneering force in the fight for women’s rights, shaping the movement from the 1840s through her death in 1902. Her intellect, vision, and enduring influence on modern feminism are now brought to life in this definitive biography, published in time for Women’s History Month.

This event is free to attend and will consist of a talk and signing, with books available for purchase. Your book purchase from Talking Leaves and/or donation to Hallwalls are the best way to support this and future events.

About the author:

Ellen Carol DuBois is distinguished professor of history at UCLA. Her pioneering works on the US woman suffrage movement include Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage, and Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote. She spent the first two decades of her career on the Women’s Studies faculty at SUNY Buffalo. She lives in Los Angeles.

Saturday, March 7, 10 a.m.: Book and publishing discussion with Megan Walrod about her journey as a debut novelist. She’ll share behind-the-scenes stories from the making of It’s Always Been Me (published by She Writes Press in June 2025)—the surprises, challenges, and lessons learned . Then the discussion opens to your questions, potentially covering anything from writing practices to publishing paths, pre-orders to book tours, creative marketing, author websites, and more. Drawing on her experience as a copywriter and marketing coach for 16+ years, Megan will offer practical and customized insights to help guide your own author journey.

Books will be available for purchase. Springville Center for the Arts, 37 N. Buffalo St., Springville, NY 14141.