The University of Arizona Press
April 3, 2024
Editor Alan Pelaez Lopez and Poet Diego Báez will be at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Sunday, April 21. Pelaez Lopez, editor of When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent, will speak on “Everything Latinidad: Challenging the Myth of the Monolith.” They will speak on the Latinidad Stage, 4:00 – 4:40 p.m. Báez will read from his latest collection, Yaguareté White, on the Poetry Stage, 2:20 – 2:40 p.m. All festival events take place on the University of Southern California campus.
The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books began in 1996 with a simple goal: to bring together the people who create books with the people who love to read them. The festival was an immediate success and has evolved to include live bands, poetry readings, film screenings and artists creating their work on-site. All outdoor events, including those with Pelaez Lopez and Báez, are free to attend. Indoor panels require a small fee for advance reservations. Discover all the 2024 Festival participants.
Congratulations to Alan and Diego!
About When Language Broke Open:
When Language Broke Open collects the creative offerings of forty-five queer and trans Black writers of Latin American descent who use poetry, prose, and visual art to illustrate Blackness as a geopolitical experience that is always changing. Telling stories of Black Latinidades, this anthology centers the multifaceted realities of the LGBTQ community.
By exploring themes of memory, care, and futurity, these contributions expand understandings of Blackness in Latin America, the Caribbean, and their U.S.-based diasporas.
About Yaguareté White:
In Diego Báez’s debut collection, Yaguareté White, English, Spanish, and Guaraní encounter each other through the elusive yet potent figure of the jaguar. The son of a Paraguayan father and a mother from Pennsylvania, Báez grew up in central Illinois as one of the only brown kids on the block—but that didn’t keep him from feeling like a gringo on family visits to Paraguay. Exploring this contradiction as it weaves through experiences of language, self, and place, Báez revels in showing up the absurdities of empire and chafes at the limits of patrimony, but he always reserves his most trenchant irony for the gaze he turns on himself.
