About this Event
Join us to celebrate the publication of . The volume centers on the writing, visual, and graphic art of 44 contemporary writers across Latin America, the Caribbean, and their diasporas. Joining us are five NYC-based Afro-Latinx contributors: Yamilette Vizcaíno Rivera, Irene Vázquez, Armando Alleyne, Edgie Amisial, and Darrel Alejandro Holnes. They'll be accompanied by editor, Alan Pelaez Lopez, a 2022-2023 Miriam Jiménez Román Fellow.
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. Learn more here.
About the panelists:
Armando Alleyne is an artist and a poet. He grew up in Lower Manhattan and graduated from the City College of New York with a BA in education and fine arts in 1983. Alleyne’s painted and collaged renditions of jazz musicians, Afro-Latin singers, boxers, and also family members and friends have a rhythm all their own. Parallel to his practice of painting portraits of Black icons, he allows elements of his lived experience to take form in his work. Never shying away from the seminal, the sensual, or the political, Alleyne’s lifetime of paintings tell a story of how we are subject to our city and how in it we can search for the tools to heal. In 2021, Alleyne’s first monograph, A Few of My Favorites, was published by Edition Patrick Frey. Alleyne lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Edgie Amisial is a queer Haitian American writer and visual artist. She was born in Florida, United States, and raised in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Growing up, storytelling helped her navigate her questions about her identity, her ancestry, and her world. She often wrote stories inspired by people she encountered in her daily life—people who she believed deserved to be remembered. After moving from Haiti to the United States at the age of eleven, she used painting and writing as tools to heal from intergenerational trauma, release fears of not belonging, and to embrace her repressed sexuality.
Darrel Alejandro Holnes is an Afro-Panamanian American performer and writer and the author of Stepmotherland (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Migrant Psalms (Northwestern Press, 2021). He is the recipient of the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize from Letras Latinas, the Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing (Poetry). His poem “Praise Song for My Mutilated World” won the C. P. Cavafy Poetry Prize from Poetry International. His writing has been published in English, Spanish, and French in literary journals, anthologies, and other books worldwide and online. He also writes for the stage and screen. Most of his writing centers on love, family, race, immigration, and joy. He works as a college professor in New York City.
Yamilette Vizcaíno Rivera is a Dominican American writer and educator based in Brooklyn. She has received fellowships from the HUES Foundation and Sundress Academy for the Arts, and was the inaugural writer in residence at Velvet Park Media. A Tin House and VONA alum, her words can be found online at Barrelhouse, Cosmonauts Avenue, and Liminal Transit Review. Her chapbook Little, Little, Little, Big, Big, Big is available from the Hellebore Press, and she is hard at work on her novel.
Irene Vázquez is a Black Mexican American poet, journalist, translator, and editor, originally from Houston, Texas, the unceded territory of the Karankawa and Ishak peoples. They write at the intersection of Black cultural work, placemaking, and the environment. Irene's debut chapbook, Take Me To the Water, was released by Bloof Books in 2022. Irene is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominated writer, whose work can be found in Muzzle, the Oxford American, and the Brooklyn Rail, among others. When not writing, Irene likes drinking coffee, watching the WNBA, and reminding folks that the South has something to say.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
20 Cooper Sq, 20 Cooper Square, New York, United States
USD 0.00