Ruben Quesada will be in store at the Book Cellar to celebrate his new book, Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry.
This event also features readings from Jordi Alonso, Adela Najarro, Francisco Aragon, Gustavo Baharona-López, and Carlo Matos.
About the Book:
Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry collects personal and academic writing from Latino, Latin American, Latinx, and Luso poets about the nature of poetry and its practice. At the heart of this anthology lies the intersection of history, language, and the human experience. The collection explores the ways in which a people’s history and language are vital to the development of a poet’s imagination and insists that the meaning and value of poetry are necessary to understand the history and future of a people. The Latinx community is not a monolith, and accordingly the poets assembled here vary in style, language, and nationality. The pieces selected expose the depth of existing verse and scholarship by poets and scholars including Brenda Cárdenas, Daniel Borzutzky, Orlando Menes, and over a dozen more.
The essays not only expand the poetic landscape but extend Latinx and Latin American linguistic and geographical boundaries. Writers, educators, and students will find awareness, purpose, and inspiration in this one-of-a-kind anthology.
About the Author:
Ruben Quesada is the editor of a hybrid collection, Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry. He is the author of Revelations and Next Extinct Mammal: Poems. His writing appears in The New York Times, Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, and Kirkus. He has served as an editor for AGNI, PANK, The Rumpus, and Pleiades and as a poetry blogger for The Kenyon Review and Ploughshares. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Antioch University-Los Angeles and for the UCLA Writers’ Program.
About the Readers:
Jordi Alonso graduated with an AB in English from Kenyon College in 2014 and was the first Turner Fellow in Poetry at Stony Brook University, where he received his MFA. He has a Ph.D. in Victorian Literature from the University of Missouri. He’s been published in Kenyon Review Online, The Banyan Review, Roanoke Review, Levure Littéraire, and other journals. Honeyvoiced, his first book, was published by XOXOX Press in 2014, and his chapbook, The Lovers’ Phrasebook, was published by Red Flag Poetry Press in 2017. He is currently working on a project involving the Latin poetry of Ubertino Carrara.