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.
“I remember sitting with my best friend, who’s still my best friend now,” Muñoz says. “We were maybe 10 years old trying to kill time and I would say, ‘Okay, shoot me a topic.’ And she would give me a topic and I would write a poem.”
Muñoz’ 2019 debut Loose Lips and her bilingual pandemic baby Everything is Returned to the Soil/Todo vuelve a la tierra are both direct extensions of her personality. The themes she is chasing in more recent work tend to explore her cultural and political identity. She absorbs what the city puts out and her poems become a singular look into the sunlit corners of Los Angeles’ mornings, its hidden pathways, its crooked crevices and its dewy neon midnight sidewalks.
She admits that as she put together her first book, she was coming out of a toxic relationship and a lot of her initial published poetry reflects the heartbreak and wreckage that that entailed. At the same time, she does not shy away from unapologetically diving into her ideas on love and eroticism. “I was really interested in how people express love,” Muñoz says. “And what love does to people and the different stages of love. Being that I am a woman of color. For me, it’s very important that I express whatever I want to express without feeling societal shame around that.”
She chose to house both her books with small indie publishers from within her poetry network. FlowerSong Press, who published her second and latest poetry collection, aims to nurture the voices of writers from underrepresented communities. The editor and publisher Edward Vidaurre, who is also a poet, first came to know Muñoz when they were both published by Prickly Pear Publishing. He later joined FlowerSong Press as publisher and ended up working with Muñoz as her editor.
“It’s the kind of writing we were looking for,” Vidaurre says. “It was LatinX Chicano writing and I was looking for that type of connection when I was going through manuscripts. Her writing is very earthy. When I was reading it, I thought these are collections that need to be out there, that kind of have been suppressed by the patriarchy.”
Muñoz doesn’t just project the power of her own voice through poetry, she also helps amplify the voices of other poets within her community. She says it is important to her to support living poets. She volunteers at places like the Sims Library Of Poetry and the Los Angeles Poet Society and has been consistently organizing events (with other poets at FlowerSong Press) to showcase a number of L.A.-based poets.
I ask her if she ever gets nervous for her own spoken word performances. She immediately says no.
At a poetry reading by FlowerSong Press hosted at Village Well Books & Coffee in Culver City, Muñoz reads a poem titled ‘For my mother, the life of the party woman.’ (Photo by Dua Anjum)
“I was born on the stage. I’ve been dancing and performing since I was born,” she says. Her mother was a traditional Mexican dance teacher and her father was a private horse trainer as well as a trick and fancy roping performer who went on tour with artists like Linda Ronstadt and Big & Rich. As a child, Muñoz found herself dragged to dance performances with her mother or at the ranch with her father, playing in the dirt as he worked with the horses.
When she was 16, her father suffered a serious brain injury and had to undergo 12 surgeries. The family was in and out of hospitals, nursing homes and rehabilitation centers for years. Muñoz saw her mother take on the primary custodian and caregiver role in the family. She says she is still very connected to her parents and they have been a significant influence on her personality and the art she creates.
She has also made an effort to reconnect with her indigenous culture through dance. “It’s so different from what I grew up doing. This is a spiritual practice,” Muñoz says. “Your dance is your prayer and it’s very intentional and everything is offered to the four directions and the elements. Every practice or ceremony, my body just really thanks me for it. It’s been a big process of reclaiming… just to think about my ancestors doing the same dances.”
Adolfo and Eva Arteaga direct Danza Azteca Xochipilli, holding practice in East L.A. twice a week. Muñoz makes it to practice regularly, sometimes wading through hour-long traffic.
“Ever since she joined our dance circle she has been so respectful and dedicated,” Adolfo says. “During the pandemic she was one of the few that continued coming to practices and performances. Leaders like her are what we need in our community.”
The husband and wife offer the indigenous dance circle as an all-ages community resource but especially focus on providing an outlet for the local youth — an alternative to gang life. Muñoz is grateful for the community she has found here. As the drums start beating, and her legs start moving, she feels her anxiety and stress fall away.
At 28, one of the grounding forces in her life is her relationship with her current partner. They met online during the pandemic and stayed connected throughout. “Our relationship started with us just writing each other letters,” Muñoz says. “And he lives by the Sequoia National Forest, so he would find [things] like hawk feathers and mail them to me.”
A connection blossomed around their shared love for nature and poetry. He too, is a poet, Muñoz says. She adds that although he isn’t someone who had ever submitted or published his work, she tries to push him out of his comfort zone to share his work, reinforcing that his writing is good and needs to be seen.
“He just submitted and was published for the first time. So every open mic that we go to together, I’m like, ‘Are you going to read today?’” Muñoz says.
Her passion for poetry is matched in this tender love story and they often spend time together just reading and writing.
Muñoz is a dog and cat mom to Lobo, a senior dog about to be sixteen, and to Darla, a 13-year-old calico cat. She spends her free afternoons working on her third manuscript. This time, she says she wants the poems to sit and breathe for a while before letting them run free.
People start to file into the store to be seated as I ask her what she loves most about performing poetry live. She chuckles and exclaims, “I never thought about that!”
After a minute of pondering, she responds, “Just that sense of connection like you’re reaching out to a stranger that’s in the audience, in the back row and something that you said really resonated with them or maybe even changed their life.”