About this Event
Join us for a book launch celebration of Wild Tongue: A Borderlands Mixtape by author and musician Jonathan Leal! This event will feature a reading and discussion of Wild Tongue with Leal and co-speaker Erin Graff Zivin.
While supplies last, attendees will also receive free first-come, first-served swag: stickers, micro-zines, or physical CD copies of a collaborative album linked to the book, also available here: https://wildtongue.bandcamp.com/album/wild-tongue.
About the participants:
Jonathan Leal is Associate Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty in Music at the University of Southern California. An acclaimed writer, musician, and scholar from South Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, his transdisciplinary work spans books, music, and collaborative arts projects. He is the author of Wild Tongue: A Borderlands Mixtape and Dreams in Double Time.
Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature and Director of the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab. Her research, teaching, and curatorial work focus on modern and contemporary Latin American literature and media, the relationship between ethics, politics, and aesthetics, and experimental art and thought. Her next book, Transmedial Exposure: Toward an Experimental Humanities, is forthcoming in Spring 2027 from Duke University Press.
About the book:
In Wild Tongue, writer, scholar, and musician Jonathan Leal invites readers to the Texas borderlands to witness contemporary sonic cultures and expressive forms of Latine struggle and world-making. Blending autoethnography, music criticism, and border theory into an epistolary mixtape, Leal depicts the borderlands as a generative place made by its inhabitants, a geography where creativity and cultural performance engage powerfully with politico-aesthetic issues, create communal identity, and challenge xenophobic and nationalist dominance. Across the mixtape’s contrasting “tracks,” Leal situates living artistries within longer, local arcs of borderlands creativity, amplifying Gloria Anzaldúa’s durable, pathbreaking observation, “Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out.” Combining lyric nonfiction, artist interviews, archival research, transdisciplinary analysis, and popular music criticism and production, Wild Tongue presents an exhilarating, embracing account of freedoms pursued between worlds.
Event venue & nearby stays
Village Well Books & Coffee, 9900 Culver Boulevard, Culver City, United States
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