About this Event
Please join us to celebrate Achy Obejas and her new book . Joining her for this reading and conversation is journalist Natalie Moore.
Please note: Masks are required for our in-person events. This event is free to attend, but registration is recommended.
Just in time for Hispanic Heritage Month comes another brilliant bilingual poetry collection by Achy Obejas--a meditation on being a queer mom to two sons.
These 44 prose poems, artful yet accessible, presented in both Spanish and English versions, immerse us in the boy kingdom that Achy Obejas inhabits with her two sons. They move from the wild and divine spirit of boyhood to the everyday rhythms of family life—mac’n’cheese, television, sick days home from school.
Achy carries multiple identities: she is Cuban American, lesbian, and Jewish. She captures the universality of motherhood while also illuminating the uniqueness of her queer, multilingual, multicultural family: the way her elder son looks as her as if she’s “dancing with the dead” when she speaks Spanish; the way her boys prefer mac’n’cheese to tostones; the day her elder son comes home from school disquieted, then finally spills it: “A couple of boys yelled at him: Your moms are queer!”
The collection is divided into four parts. The first part focuses primarily on Achy’s sons, and subsequent parts branch out into stories of her parents, her roots in Cuba, and her divorce.
Achy Obejas is a Cuban-American writer, translator, and activist whose work focusing on personal and national identity has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Fifth Wednesday Journal, TriQuarterly, Another Chicago Magazine and many other publications. A native of Havana, she currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area.
Natalie Y. Moore is an award-winning journalist based in Chicago, whose reporting tackles race, housing, economic development, food injustice and violence. She is available for speeches or keynotes on these issues.
Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email [email protected] by no later than 14 days before the event. For other questions or access needs, please email .
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Women & Children First, 5233 North Clark Street, Chicago, United States
USD 0.00
