Hip Hop Poet/Actor Paul Flores Performs at Miracle Theatre, 2/13

Paul Flores, hip-hop poet and actor from San Francisco, will be visiting Portland in early February for workshops with the Spanish English International School (SEIS) at Roosevelt High School. Raised on the Tijuana/San Diego border, issues of immigration, border experience and Latino identity are central to Flores' work, and he is recognized as a trailblazer in new Latino performance arts as both an artist and producer. His residency program will culminate in a bilingual spoken-word presentation at Milagro Theatre that features Flores' writing as well as selected original work by SEIS students.

The performance, which is free and open to the public, begins at 2:00 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 13 at the Milagro Theatre (525 SE Stark St., Portland).

This workshop presentation is made possible in part by funding from Oregon Community Foundation, JP Morgan Chase and the Albina Rotary Foundation

ABOUT Paul Flores
Paul S. co-founded the poetry performance ensemble Los Delicados with whom he has recorded the CD Word Descarga on Calaca Press (2000). He is founding artistic director of Chicano Messengers of Spoken Word and author of the novel Along the Border Lies (awarded the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles National Literary Award in 2003). A theater artist specializing in hip-hop and bilingual performance, Flores co-wrote De/Cipher (2001) and No Man's Land (2002) with Marc Bamuthi Joseph, The Fruitvale Project (2003) with Elia Arce, and Fear of a Brown Planet (2005) directed by Tony Garcia. His most recent play is REPRESENTA!, a bilingual hip-hop theater project co-commissioned by the San Francisco International Arts Festival and La Peña Cultural Center, written and performed with Cuban rapper Julio Cardenas and directed by Danny Hoch. REPRESENTA! premiered at the Hip-Hop Theater Festival: Bay Area and the SF International Arts Festival in May 2007, and is currently on tour to the GALA Hispanic Theater in DC, Abrons Art Center NY, NJPAC and Lehigh University PA. Flores has also performed his solo work across the United States and internationally including the National Hip-Hop Festival in Havana and America Libre Hip-Hop in Mexico City. His television work includes being a featured artist on Season Four of Russell Simmons Presents: Def Poetry on HBO. In addition to creating and performing his own artistic work, Flores is a highly respected youth arts development specialist, whose expertise in urban youth programs is recognized nationwide. For the last twelve years he has mentored teen poets as the former Program Director of Youth Speaks. His services in this area have also been sought by organizations throughout the country including Tigertail Productions (Miami), Multicultural Education and Counseling in the Arts (Houston), El Centro Su Teatro (Denver), Miracle Theatre (Portland) and South Division High School (Milwaukee), among many others. Flores currently facilitates and develops curriculum for Oakland public schools on gang and violence prevention through the Spanish Speaking Unity Council and the City of Oakland's Measure Y Anti-Violence Campaign. This latter assignment recently led Flores into working directly with incarcerated youth at San Francisco's Youth Guidance Center and Alameda Juvenile Hall where he has adapted the program to emphasize alternatives to gang membership. As a result of his work as an artist and youth arts specialist Flores has been an invited lecturer/speaker to over one hundred high schools and universities including Stanford University, Brown University, University of Georgia, University of North Carolina, Colorado State, UC San Diego, Macalester College and University of Wisconsin. Paul Flores holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, has twice been awarded the National Performance Network Creation Fund and recently received a San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Commission and is one of the first ever recipients of the Center for Cultural Innovation Individual Artist Grant. He is father to Santos Enrique Flores-Garcia, married to Tamaya Garcia, who is the Development Director at Center for Young Women's Development in San Francisco. (Family photo at Casa Fruta Hollister, California by Francisco Cardona. For more information, visit http://www.myspace.com/paulfloresrepresenta.

ABOUT MIRACLE THEATRE GROUP
The Miracle Theatre Group has been dedicated to bringing the vibrancy of Latino theatre to the Northwest community and beyond for more than 25 years. In addition to its national tours, Miracle provides a home for Spanish and Latin American arts and culture at El Centro Milagro, where it enriches the local community with a variety of community outreach projects and educational programs designed to share the diversity of Latino culture. For more information about the Miracle Theatre Group, visit www.milagro.org or call 503-236-7253.

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