The University of Arizona Press
Date: Saturday, April 12, 2025
Time: 2 p.m., CDT
Where: Elgin Community College, Building H, Classroom 123, 1700 Spartan Dr., Elgin, IL
Poet Diego Báez, author of Yaguareté White, is the featured Guest Speaker at the Elgin Poetry Fest. The all-day event is presented by Elgin Literacy Connection to celebrate National Poetry Month; tickets for the day are $10-80 and are available here. The festival also includes a poetry workshop led by Chasity Gunn and an evening poetry slam.
About the book:
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.
