Please join us on September 24th, from 6-9 PM for the Charras: A True Novel About the Assassination That Roiled The Yucatan book launch at dba (618 Frenchmen Street.) We will have readings from local authors Ariel Francisco and Skye Jackson, followed by a reading of Charras by Christopher Louis Romaguera. There will be copies of Charras, for sale. After the readings, there will be music by Los Güiros. Synopsis and bios below.
Charras is the true story of Efraín “El Charras” Calderón Lara, a twenty-six-year-old union leader and student activist, and the Yucatecan government’s successful plot to kidnap and murder him. Acclaimed Mexican novelist Hernán Lara Zavala combines real-life newspaper articles and interviews with renderings of key events, laying the state-sanctioned narrative of Charras’s death beside the actual experiences of those involved. To kaleidoscopic effect, Zavala enters not only the mind of the hero but also those in his orbit: the governor of the Yucatán, Charras’s bureaucrat brother-in-law, even the mercenary hired to carry out the kidnapping—the chilling “you” whose point-of- view the reader must inhabit to unravel what took place during that fateful spring of 1974.
Come out and support some live local readings (and music!)
Christopher Louis Romaguera is a Cuban-American writer who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was born in Hialeah, Florida and graduated from Florida International University in Miami, Florida. He has an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) at the University of New Orleans. Romaguera has been published in Passages North, New Orleans Review, Pleiades Magazine, Catapult, Massachusetts Review and other publications. He was a monthly columnist at The Ploughshares Blog from 2018-2023 and was the Poetry Editor at Peauxdunque Review. Romaguera was an Editorial Intern at Electric Literature. He is a VONA alum and was a 2023 Periplus Fellow.
Ariel Francisco is the author of All the Places We Love Have Been Left in Ruins (Burrow Press, 2024), Under Capitalism If Your Head Aches They Just Yank Off Your Head (Flowersong Press, 2022), and A Sinking Ship is Still a Ship (Burrow Press, 2020), and the translator of Haitian-Dominican poet Jacques Viau Renaud’s Poet of One Island (Get Fresh Books, 2024) and Guatemalan poet Hael Lopez’s Routines/Goodbyes (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022). A poet and translator born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents and raised in Miami, his work has been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, POETRY Magazine, The New York City Ballet, Latino Book Review, and elsewhere. He is Assistant Professor of Poetry and Hispanic Studies at Louisiana State University.
Skye Jackson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is a graduate of the UNO Creative Writing Workshop. Her work has appeared in RHINO, The Southern Review, Palette Poetry, RATTLE and elsewhere. Her poetry has been a finalist for the Iowa Review Poetry Award, the RATTLE Poetry Prize, the RHINO Founders' Prize, and in 2021 she received the AWP Intro Journals Award. Jackson’s work was also selected by Billy Collins for inclusion in the Library of Congress Poetry 180 Project. She has received support for her work from The Frost Place, The Key West Literary Seminar & Cave Canem. This past summer, she served as the Writer-in-Residence of the Jack Kerouac House. Her debut poetry collection, Libre, has just been published by Regalo Press and distributed by Simon & Schuster. She currently teaches at Xavier University.
Los Güiros is an original Psychedelic Cumbia based in New Orleans, LA. Blending the influence of traditional folkloric dance rhythms of Colombia and the trippy guitar & organ driven sounds of Peruvian Chicha with modern electronic elements, Los Güiros brings listeners of all backgrounds on a musical journey that honors the past while pushing into the future.
Also check out other Arts events in New Orleans, Literary Art events in New Orleans, Workshops in New Orleans.
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