FREE Author Talk with Poet and Memoirist Carmen Calatayud, Wednesday, December 18th, 2024
A Free Monthly Online Lecture Series from WritingWorkshops.com & Gemini Ink
Wednesday, December 18th, 2024 via Zoom @ 7PM CST (Add to Cart to RSVP for Free)
Up Next: a conversation with Carmen Calatayud, author of This Tangled Body. Moderated by Francisco Aragón.
This Tangled Body reads as a surreal poetic memoir, navigating family history, war, migration, and the grit of relationships. Through lyrical language, the poet searches for ways to rescue a body that knows pain, addiction, and generational trauma. Elegies, love letters, and concussions cross paths here, along with planets and stars, demonstrating that the potential to heal is possible when raw truth and grace are present. Calatayud’s willingness to face the land of the dead and cross all borders is on full display. As she invites us to “leave this continent and/light the path behind us on fire,” her poetry insists we return to love and love hard.
Author Carmen Calatayud is the daughter of immigrants: A Spanish father and an Irish mother. In conjunction with Letras Latinas, her book This Tangled Body was published by FlowerSong Press in 2024. Her first book In the Company of Spirits (Press 53) was a runner-up for the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award and a finalist for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Calatayud is a Larry Neal Poetry Award winner and a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop.
Moderator Francisco Aragón is the author of three books of poetry, including After Rubén (2020), Glow of Our Sweat (2010), and Puerta de Sol (2005). He’s also the editor of, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (2007). His more than twenty anthology publications include Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology (2024); Queer Nature: An Ecoqueer Poetry Anthology (2022) and Why To These Rocks: 50 Years of Poems from the Community of Writers (2021). His poems and translations have appeared in numerous literary journals, both print and online. A native of San Francisco, CA, he is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants. He is on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, where he teaches courses in Latinx poetry and creative writing, and directs Letras Latinas, their literary initiative. He has read his work widely, including at universities, bookstores, art galleries, and the Dodge Poetry Festival.
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Previously: We featured Ramona Reeves:
The Big Texas Author Talk is a *free* lecture series devoted to showcasing Texas authors from across our big state. Each month we feature one Texas author in conversation with another—from New York Times bestsellers living in Dallas, Houston, and Austin to our rich Texas Latinx border authors living in Laredo and McAllen, not to mention from other deep pockets and corners of our culturally diverse state.
Our lecture series is as entertaining as it is informative—and like Texas itself, we offer a vast array of storytellers who represent the spirit of our extremely distinct Lone Star State and continue to keep us on the literary map.
In the past, we’ve featured novelists such as Kathleen Kent, Marisol Cortez, Joe Lansdale, and Antonio Ruiz-Camacho and Texas poet laureates such as Carmen Tafolla, Laurie Ann Guerrero, Jenny Brown, and Emmy Perez.
If you’ve visited with us over the last three years, you know who we are and what we do, and we thank you for your ongoing support. We value your presence and love seeing your faces!
If you’re new to the Big Texas Author Talk and are just discovering who we are and what we do, we welcome you to join us virtually on the third Wednesday of every month at 7 pm CST.
PREVIOUS AUTHORS/TITLES INCLUDE
- Debut Novelist Fowzia Karimi: Above Us the Milky Way
- Edgar-winning novelist Joe R. Lansdale: Edge of Dark Water
- Winner of the Iowa Prize for Nonfiction Kendra Allen: When You Learn the Alphabet
- 2020 Texas Poet Laureate Emmy Perez: With The River on Our Face
- New York Times Bestselling Author Kathleen Kent: The Dime & The Burn
- Critically Acclaimed Novelist David Samuel Levinson: Tell Me How This Ends Well
- Award-Winning writer Antonio Ruiz-Camacho's Barefoot Dogs
- San Antonio Poet Andrea "Vocab" Sanderson's She Lives in Music
- Debut Novelist Heather Harper Ellett: Ain't Nobody Nobody
- Amanda Eyre Ward's New York Times bestselling novel The Jetsetters
- Jenny Browne's New and Selected Poems
- Rebekah Manley's Alexandra and the Awful, Awkward, No Fun, Truly Bad Dates
- Cliff Hudder, Pretty Enough for You
- Nan Cuba, Body and Bread
- Sherry Kafka Wagner, Hannah Jackson
- Edward Vidaurre, Pandemia & Other Poems
- Sergio Troncoso's, A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son
- Octavio Quintanilla, If I Go Missing
- Marisol Cortez, Luz at Midnight
- Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8
- Mike Soto, A Grave is Given Supper
- Barbara Ras, The Blues of Heaven
- Johnnie Bernhard, Sisters of the Undertow
- Wondra Chang, Sonju
- Alexandra van de Kamp, Ricochet Script
- Laurie Ann Guerrero, I Have Eaten The Rattlesnake
- Carmen Tafolla, The Last Butterfly/La Ultima Mariposa, illustrated by Regina Moya
- Jill Alexander Essbaum, Hausfrau: A Novel.
- Daniel Peña, Bang
- Tomás Q. Morín, Let Me Count the Ways
- Allison Hedge Coke, Look at this Blue
- Vincent Cooper, Zarzamora
- Leticia Urieta, Las Criaturas
- Steve Adams, Remember This
- Andrew Porter, The Disappeared
- Novelist Rubén Degollado's The Family Izquierdo (W.W. Norton, 2022).
- Thomas H. McNeely's story collection, Pictures of the Shark.
- Katie Gutierrez's novel, More Than You'll Ever Know
- Carmen Tafolla's novel, Warrior Girl
- Rudy Ruiz's novel, Valley of Shadows
- Mag Gabbert, SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS
- Alex Temblador, Writing an Identity Not Your Own: A Guide for Creative Writers