Reading Series November 2022

7 PM CDT - Bilingual Spanish-English reading featuring lectures and creative work in and between Spanish and English with featured readers including Roberto Tejada, José Peña Loyola, Valentina Jager, Nicholas Rattner, and Vanessa Beatriz Golenia

We're excited to continue the 2022–2023 Gulf Coast Reading Series at Lawndale Art Center!

This entry in the Gulf Coast Reading Series presents original, translated, and multilingual writing across Spanish and English. Participating readers include faculty and students from graduate programs in the English Creative Writing department and the PhDs in Spanish with a Concentration in Creative Writing from the Hispanic Studies department.

Please join us on November 18th at 7pm (doors open at 6:30). 

Please note:
Masks will be required while indoors at this event. N95 and KN95 masks are strongly encouraged. Social distancing is encouraged.

Roberto Tejada is the author of poetry collections Why the Assembly Disbanded (2022), Full Foreground (2012), Exposition Park (2010), and Mirrors for Gold (2006), as well as Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (essays, 2019), a Latinx poetics on colonial settlement and cultural counter-conquest in art and literature of the Americas. His many art and media histories include the books National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (2009) and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (2009), as well as catalog essays in Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 (Hammer Museum, 2011) and Allora & Calzadilla: Specters of Noon (The Menil Collection, 2021). He is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston.

José Peña Loyola is a Ph.D. candidate in the Creative Writing concentration of the Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston. He holds an M.F.A. in Art Writing from the School of Visual Arts in New York. His writing has appeared, or its forthcoming, in The Brooklyn Rail, Degree Critical, Manifold Experimental Criticism, El Otro Cine, Recodo.sx, among others. His current creative and academic work revolves around the formation of discourses, images, and affects around the Andean landscape and territory.

Valentina Jager is a sculptor, writer, and translator from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where she grew up among movie sets and cocktails with tiny paper parasols. She received an MA in Art in Context from the Berlin University of the Arts, focusing on artistic research and public memorial culture, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston. Since 2012 when she first encountered it, Valentina has become a Butoh enthusiast. 

Nick Rattner lives in Troy, NY. Recent work has appeared in / will soon appear in RHINO, Fence, Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Sixth Finch, Pleiades, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Denver Quarterly, Salt Hill, and Asymptote. At present, he is translating the work of Spanish poet Juan Andrés García Román, with the recent chapbook Little Songs from Foundlings Press (2022) and a forthcoming book The Adoration from Quantum Prose (2023), for which he received a grant from Spain's Ministry of Education.

Vanessa Beatriz Golenia grew up straddling the Tijuana-San Diego border in a home with no common language. Prior to moving to Houston, she bounced between Brooklyn and Los Angeles, writing capitalist poetry for corporate beauty brands. Her work has appeared in Longreads, the Rumpus, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, and elsewhere. In 2020, an essay she wrote was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. These days you can find her slowly chiseling away at her first book.