By Dua Anjum
FROM: Ampersand

Briana Muñoz spits fire into a microphone. She belts out words that form a dance circle of their own accord, which is fitting considering Muñoz has been a dancer since birth. Her dance permeates her poetry just as her poetry permeates her dance. She holds nothing back.

Muñoz is a poet and folklore dancer. Born in San Diego County, she lived her entire life on the edge of the U.S.-Mexico border until four years ago when she moved to Los Angeles to work as a sales manager at Carbon Activated Corp. She has immersed herself within the poetry spaces of the city, curating a name for herself as a spoken word performance artist and although she would rather be writing full-time, she says, “That’s not going to pay for my studio in Koreatown.”

I meet her on a good day — she is doing two reading events back-to-back and is enlivened to be doing in-person shows again after a long pause during the pandemic. We sit outside the bookstore in Culver City where she is about to perform. Los Angeles is a home that keeps Muñoz inspired. “There is so much movement. You just walk out the door and there’s a poem,” she says. “Literally driving down the street and you see a moment or a person or the way that the sun’s hitting Downtown L.A. or just a memory that comes up and then you’re like, ‘Ooh, that’s good. I need to write something about that.’”

Today, Muñoz is a published author and she looks back with fondness on the first moments that poetry touched her life. She has been writing since she was a child and dreamed of being a published author since she was a middle-schooler. Read Rest of Article Here