Name: Black Box Syndrome: Visualizing Chicano Voices
Start: 2025-01-11T12:00:00-07:00
End: 2025-01-11T14:00:00-07:00
Location: Ken Sanders Rare Books

Poetry book reading & Art reflection W/ Jose-Luis Moctezuma, a Xicano poet and author of Black Box Syndrome.
About this Event

Black Box Syndrome: Visualizing Chicano Voices

Join us for Black Box Syndrome: A Poetry Reading and Art Reflection, featuring José-Luis Moctezuma. This captivating collection of poems, inspired by the I Ching’s hexagrams, explores themes of financialization, cultural resilience, and poetic innovation. Synthesizing chance aesthetics, Aztec science, and the black box metaphor, Moctezuma’s work offers a counter-narrative to the logic of empire. Engage with this compelling text through a live reading and an interactive art reflection activity, where participants will create visual interpretations of the poems.

Jose-Luis Moctezuma is a Xicano poet, essayist, and researcher. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Chicago. His poetry and criticism have been published in Postmodern Culture, Peripheries, Modernism/modernity, Fence, Jacket2, Chicago Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Spring Tlaloc Seance, was published by Projective Industries in January 2016. His first full-length book, Place-Discipline, was published by Omnidawn in October 2018. Place-Discipline was selected by Myung Mi Kim as the winner of the 2017 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Prize. His second book, Black Box Syndrome, was published by Omnidawn in December 2023. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)