Raíces/Roots: A Companion Book Launch with Camilo Loaiza Bonilla

Tombolo Books welcomes local poet and visual artist Camilo Loaiza Bonilla to the bookstore for a celebration of the companion book, Raíces/Roots!

Join us for an evening of poetry, art, and conversation as we launch the companion book to the exhibition Raíces/Roots: Camilo Loaiza Bonilla! Through essays, personal reflections, and an artist interview, this book explores Camilo Loaiza Bonilla’s groundbreaking fusion of digital poetics and visual art. Contributors highlight themes of migration, queer and trans identity, intergenerational memory, and healing, offering critical insight and intimate testimony about storytelling’s liberatory potential.

Loaiza Bonilla will be in conversation with local author and art historian, Lesley Wolff!

Camilo Loaiza Bonilla, MFA, is a Latine writer working to unwind generational silence as a queer, trans, first-generation immigrant. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of South Florida and, with support from Macondo Writers Workshop, Tin House, Graywolf Press, and Black Lawrence Press, his work is in or forthcoming from Hayden's Ferry Review, Frontier Poetry, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. Exploring the intersection of poetry and visual art, he is the 2025-2026 Eleanor Merritt Fellow at The John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art and the inaugural Poet-in-Residence at Hillsborough Community College’s Art Galleries. His solo art exhibition—Raíces/Roots: Camilo Loaiza Bonilla—is now on view at The University of Tampa’s Scarfone/Hartley Gallery.

Lesley A. Wolff, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Art and Design at the University of Tampa. Wolff’s scholarship engages the intersections of visual culture, food, gender, and heritage in 20th and 21st century Mexico, the Caribbean, and the US. She is the author of Culinary Palettes: The Visuality of Food in Postrevolutionary Mexican Art (University of Texas Press, 2025) and co-editor of the volume Nourish and Resist: Food and Feminisms in Contemporary Global Caribbean Art (Yale University Press, 2024) as well as the special journal issue of Arts dedicated to “Rethinking Contemporary Latin American Art” (2023). Her scholarship can be found in journals such as African and Black Diaspora, Gender & History, Humanities, Food, Culture & Society, and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. Wolff is also an active curator committed to revisionist art histories of the Americas and has collaborated with museums and galleries across the US. For more: www.lesleywolff.com

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