Read with the Lit & Luz Book Club!
The Lit & Luz Book Club/Club de lectura was created and organized by Miguel Jiménez as an opportunity for Chicagoans to read and discuss some of today’s most exciting contemporary Mexican and Mexican American authors in both Spanish and English. This year’s Lit & Luz Book Club authors includes two 2023-24 Collaboration Cohort participants who will join us in Chicago this fall, and a Lit & Luz alumn.
El Club de lectura Lit & Luz fue creado y organizado por Miguel Jiménez para ofrecerles la oportunidad a todos los residentes de Chicago de leer y discutir algunos de los más emocionantes textos literarios contemporáneos de autorxs mexicanos y mexicoamericanos tanto en español como en inglés. Este año, entre las autoras del Club de lectura Lit & Luz se encuentran dos participantes del Grupo de Colaboración 2023-23, quienes nos acompañarán en Chicago este otoño, y un ex participante del Lit & Luz 2018-19.
El sueño de toda célula / The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers (Cardboard House Press, 2022)
In Vitro by Isabel Zapata, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers (Coffee House Press, 2023)
Promises of Gold / Promesas de oro by José Olivarez, translated from the English by David Ruano González (Henry Holt & Co., 2023)
Find these titles at your local book shop, including:
Pilsen Community Books, Exile in Bookville, and City Lit Books
Click here to join the book club today!
El sueño de toda célula / The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers (Cardboard House Press, 2022)
Instagram live: Ten questions with Maricela Guerrero
@MAKELit
Wednesday, September 27,
6:30 p.m. CT
Join the book club to receive event links.
About the book
"'Encouragement is a round warm form of resistance,' writes Maricela Guerrero, as if describing her own project. In these powerful and necessary poems, beautifully rendered by Robin Myers, Guerrero reveals a worldwide cellular consciousness that generously offers us rivers of leaves and wolves to feed and clean the heart and its languages. Building furrows of words and speaking in tree, Guerrero creates a poetry to shelter in. In her capable hands and tongue we are carried in rivers of nourishment. It's exactly what the world needs, and I am flooded with gratitude. For joy, for grace, for tenderness, for righteous grief and its acknowledgment, for inspiration and sustenance, you must read this book."-- Eleni Sikelianos
"Maricela Guerrero leads us right back into the classrooms where many of us first encountered the scientific language that opened us to (and distanced us from) the plant kingdom. And she leads us out again, forcing us to confront the territories of devastation before she introduces us, suddenly small, into the cells, the sap in the trees, the shapes of the leaves. Everything pulses and everything shines there: language, connections among the elements, protest. What wise, warm writing by Maricela Guerrero, and what a marvelous English translation by Robin Myers, a poet herself. An essential voice in the eco-poetry being written within the Spanish language today."-- Cristina Rivera Garza
About the Author & the Translator
Maricela Guerrero (poet, writer and teacher). She is the author of nine poetry collections: The most recently is A río revuelto (Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 2022); El sueño de toda célula/ The dream of Every Cell, (Ediciones Antílope/Instituto Veracruzano de la Cultura, Mexico City, 2018) translated by Robin Myers and published by Cardboard House Press, 2022; Kilimanjaro, translated by Stalina Villareal (Cardboard House Press, 2018). Guerrero has been a fellow of the prestigious National System of Artists in Mexico and she won Clemencia Isaura Prize in 2018 with her book The dream of Every Cell. Her work has been translated into German, Swedish, and French.
Robin Myers is a translator and poet. Recent and forthcoming translations include Another Life by Daniel Lipara (Eulalia Books), The Science of Departures by Adalber Salas Hernández (Kenning Editions), Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos (Open Letter Books), The Restless Dead by Cristina Rivera Garza (Vanderbilt University Press), and Animals at the End of the World by Gloria Susana Esquivel (University of Texas Press). She writes a monthly column for Palette Poetry and lives in Mexico City.
Praise for the book
Guerrero shows us that to embrace the teachings of nature means to embrace something profoundly human. With this bilingual edition, readers of both languages can appreciate the construction of an ecological ethos that The Dream of Every Cell poeticizes.— Alec Schumacher, MAKE Literary Magazine
In Vitro by Isabel Zapata, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers (Coffee House Press, 2023)
Instagram Live: TEn questions with Isabel Zapata @mAKELIT
Monday, October 2nd, 6 p.m.
Join the book club to receive event links.
About the Book
A MEDITATION ON IN VITRO FERTILIZATION THAT EXPANDS AND COMPLICATES THE STORIES WE TELL ABOUT PREGNANCY.
Medical interventions become an exercise in patience, desire, and delirium in this intimate account of bodily transformation and disruption. In candid, graceful prose, Isabel Zapata gives voice to the strangeness and complexities of conception and motherhood that are rarely discussed publicly. Zapata frankly addresses the misogyny she experienced during fertility treatments, explores the force of grief in imagining possible futures, and confronts the societal expectations around maternity. In the tradition of Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors and Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness, In Vitro draws from diary and essay forms to create a new kind of literary companion and open up space for nuanced conversations about pregnancy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR & the Translator
Isabel Zapata is a Mexico City–born writer and editor. She is the author of the poetry book Una ballena es un país and the bilingual essay collection Alberca vacía / Empty Pool (trans. Robin Myers). Recent work has appeared in English translation in World Literature Today, Waxwing, The Common, and Words Without Borders. She is a cofounder and publisher at Ediciones Antílope.
Robin Myers is a translator and poet. Recent and forthcoming translations include Another Life by Daniel Lipara (Eulalia Books), The Science of Departures by Adalber Salas Hernández (Kenning Editions), Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos (Open Letter Books), The Restless Dead by Cristina Rivera Garza (Vanderbilt University Press), and Animals at the End of the World by Gloria Susana Esquivel (University of Texas Press). She writes a monthly column for Palette Poetry and lives in Mexico City.
Praises for the book
“A feat of compression: slim, fragmentary, and generous with the white space, allowing ample breathing room to take in those painful parts. . . .It is as if we are reading over her pregnant shoulder as she attempts to navigate the change she’s brought about in her life.” —Shayne Terry, Chicago Review of Books
“In this essay-like collection, Zapata examines in vitro fertilization and the narratives that drive societal expectations and pressures in conception and pregnancy. Unveiling a nuanced view of motherhood and fertility treatment, In Vitro will illuminate aspects of pregnancy not often discussed.” —Lupita Aquino, TODAY
Promises of Gold / Promesas de oro by José Olivarez, translated from the English by David Ruano González (Henry Holt & Co., 2023)
Online Author conversation With José Olivarez and DaviD Ruano
October 18, 12 PM
Join the book club to receive event links.
About the Book
“How many bad lovers have gotten poems? How many crushes? No disrespect to romantic love—but what about our friends? Those homies who are there all along—cheering for us and reminding us that love is abundant.”
In this groundbreaking collection of poems, José Olivarez explores every kind of love—self, brotherly, romantic, familial, cultural. Grappling with the contradictions of the American Dream with unflinching humanity, he lays bare the ways in which “love is complicated by forces larger than our hearts.”
Whether readers enter this collection in English or via the Spanish translation by poet David Ruano, these extraordinary poems are sure to become beloved for their illuminations of life—and love.
About the Author and the translator
José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. It was named a top book of 2018 by the Adroit Journal, NPR, and the New York Public Library. Along with Felicia Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he coedited the poetry anthology The BreakBeat Poets Vil. 4: LatiNext. He cohost the poetry podcast The Poetry Gods.
David Ruano González is a Mexican poet, translator, and cultural manage based in Mexico City. He was a poetry fellow at the Foundation for the Mexican Literature (2014-2015). In 2019, he founded Melancholy of Forgotten Tapes, an idependent label/publishing company that publishes poetry books accompanied by sound elements in cassette form and whose first project was Mixtape, of his own authorship. Ruano is currently part of MAKE’s Lit & Luz Festival organization and publishes his own translations on his peronal blog medoriorules.medium.com.
Praises for the book
“This book reads like an ode to people of color who are handed a broom, assumed to be the help, when in reality we are equal. [Olivarez is] rewriting the history of colonization and challenging us to unlearn its impacts one poem at a time.” —Chicago Reader
“Details grounded in the everyday world capture great fulfillment… The poet’s sensitive and insightful voice allows these stirring poems to successfully explore the forces acting on love in a complex world, and the unshakable promise of understanding and belonging.” —Publishers Weekly
“The best part about reading Olivarez’s work is that his language is cordial toward the reader. He is one of the few poets who uses accessible language, and everyone regardless of educational background can enjoy his poems.” —New City Lit
For questions about groups, content, or other, contact
Miguel Jiménez, miguel@makemag.org
If you’re looking for additional recommendations, please check out these past book club titles:
