Author Lisa Alvarez calls herself “a mild-mannered professor of English at Irvine Valley College.” Watch her guerrilla reading of her short-short story Cielito Lindo and decide for yourself how true that is. This story appeared in the Sudden Fiction Latino anthology.
Alvarez is also co-director of the summer writers workshops at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. She blogs as Rebel Girl at MarkOnTheWall.
How appropriate – a Rebel Girl on GuerrillaReads.
Posted in GuerrillaReads
Tagged author, guerrilla, Latino Book and Family Festival, Lisa Alvarez, short story, writing
Manny Pacheco wants to make sure you remember. Here he is reading from his book, Forgotten Hollywood, Forgotten History. It’s a book about the people from the Golden Age of Hollywood that sometimes are forgotten – the supporting actors who helped make the leads look so good. Pacheco is a radio and TV personality from the OC whose voice you might recognize from all sorts of ads. Forgotten Hollywood is his first book.
Recorded at the Latino Book and Family Festival in October 2010.
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Tagged author, guerrilla, Hollywood, Latino Book and Family Festival, Manny Pacheco, reading, writing
Victor Cass is police officer by day, writer and artist by night. In his book Telenovela, he explores the lives of Lorena and Miriya, two women who (it seems) couldn’t be any more different from each other. Perhaps Cass’s own multifaceted life gave him insight into how opposites can be not-so-opposite after all.
Here Cass reads an excerpt from the book. Recorded at the Latino Book and Family Festival in October.
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Tagged Argentina, author, guerrilla, Latino Book and Family Festival, literature, novel, Pasadena, reading, telenovela, Victor Cass, writing
Native Angeleno Melinda Palacio is a poet and novelist. Here she reads three poems from Folsom Lockdown, which won the Kulupi Press Sense of Place award.
Melinda recently described the back story behind Folsom Lockdown:
Earlier this year, in January, my sister Emily convinced me to accompany her on a difficult journey, visiting our father in Folsom Prison…. I didn’t realize the importance of this visit until weeks after I had arrived home. One day a downpour of poems kept my pen flowing. I wrote twelve poems about the experience over a weekend. My friend Susan read some of the poems and was the first to announce that I had a chapbook, and a good one. Keep writing more of those poems, Melinda, were her words to me.
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Tagged author, Folsom, guerrilla, Latino Book and Family Festival, literature, Melinda Palacio, Panama, poem, poet, poetry, writing
Luis J. Rodriguez is a poet, novelist, memoirist and – now – a guerrilla reader! Here he is reading from short story collection, The Republic of East L.A. It begins powerfully:
I wanted to be a writer even before I knew what writing was about. I wanted to carve out the words that swam in the bloodstream, to press a stunted pencil onto paper so lines break free like birds in flight…
Rodriguez is the author of fourteen books. He’s also co-founder of Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural and Bookstore, a terrific resource for things literary and Latino, in the heart of L.A.’s San Fernando Valley.
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Tagged author, East L.A., guerrilla, Latino Book and Family Festival, literature, Luis J. Rodriguez, reading, short story, writing
Alicia Partnoy is a human rights activist, poet, translator and scholar.
A political activist in Argentina in the 1970s, she is a survivor of the secret detention camps where more than 30,000 people “disappeared” from her country. Her testimony before the Argentine Commission for the Investigation of Disappearances, entitled “Nunca Más,” became a bestseller when it was published in 1984. She is perhaps best known as the author of The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival.
In this guerrilla reading, Partnoy reads from her book of poetry, Little Low Flying / Volando Bajito (translated by Gail Wronsky).
Learn more about Partnoy and her work.
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Tagged Argentina, author, desaparecidos, guerrilla, Latino Book and Family Festival, literature, poet, poetry, reading, writing
Author David Corbett reads from his novel about immigration, war and family, Do They Know I’m Running?
Corbett explained his approach to this book in a recent blog post:
Believing that what was genuinely needed at this time was a more sincere, empathetic but not sanitized attempt to imagine the lives of people we think of as different, and remembering one of my favorite quotes from John Coltrane–“If there is something one does not understand, one must go humbly to it”–I tried in Do They Know I’m Running? to depict a Salvadoran-American family dealing with both the damage of war and the nightmare of deportation.
Before writing his first novel, Corbett worked for a private investigations firm and his wife’s law practice. He’s the author of three critically acclaimed novels as well as many articles and stories.
Posted in GuerrillaReads
Tagged author, border, David Corbett, El Salvador, guerrilla, immigration, Latino Book and Family Festival, literature, noir, novel, reading, veteran, writing
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