The University of Arizona Press
Date: Friday, September 27, 2024
Time: 6 – 8 p.m., EDT
Where: August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Pittsburgh online event
Malika Aisha, Jehoiada Calvin, Louie Ortiz-Fonseca, Tirzah Sheppard, and Ivanova Veras join LIT Friday for a group reading and discussion of When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent, edited by Alan Pelaez Lopez. The writers are all contributors to When Language Broke Open.
LIT Fridays is a literary-focused, virtual salon presented by the August Wilson African American Cultural Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, featuring conversations and guest performances on the last Friday of each month at 6:00p EST via Facebook, YouTube Live, and StreamYard. All conversations are moderated by AWAACC Literary Curator, Jessica Lanay.
The free event is open to the public.
About the book:
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. The volume offers up three central questions: How do queer and/or trans Black writers of Latin American descent address memory? What are the textures of caring, being cared for, and accepting care as Black queer and/or trans people of Latin American descent? And how do queer and trans embodiments help us understand and/or question the past and the present, and construct a Black, queer, and trans future?
