The University of Arizona Press
Date: Saturday, May 18, 2024
Time: 3 p.m., EST
Where: Union Ave Books, 517 Union Ave, Knoxville, TN
Union Ave Books welcomes Chicago poet Diego Báez in conversation with local poet Erin Elizabeth Smith. Báez will also read from his debut collection, Yaguareté White. 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.
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.
