The University of Arizona Press
Date: Sunday, April 21, 2024
Time: 2:20 p.m. – 2:40 p.m., PDT
Where: Poetry Stage, USC campus, Los Angeles, CA
Diego Báez will read from his book Yaguareté White, at the 2024 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Sunday, April 21. Báez is the recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, the Surge Institute, and the Poetry Foundation’s Incubator for Community-Engaged Poets. In his debut collection, Yaguareté White, English, Spanish, and Guaraní encounter each other through the elusive yet potent figure of the jaguar. The reading will take place on the Poetry Stage from 2:20 p.m. to 2:40 p.m. Events on the outdoor Poetry Stage are free and open to the public.
About the Book:
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. Cutting across borders of every kind, Báez’s poems attempt to reconcile the incomplete, contradictory, and inconsistent experiences of a speaking self that resides between languages, nations, and generations. Yaguareté White is a lyrical exploration of Paraguayan American identity and what it means to see through a colored whiteness in all of its tangled contradictions.
