Name: L.A. Book Launch: Bad Mexican, Bad American by Jose Hernandez Diaz
Start: 2024-02-24T19:00:00-08:00
Location: Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center

L.A. Book Launch: Bad Mexican, Bad American by Jose Hernandez Diaz

Beyond Baroque is one of the United States' leading independent Literary/Arts Centers and public spaces dedicated to literary and cultural production, contact, interaction, and community building. Founded in 1968, it is based in the Old Town Hall in Venice, California, near the Pacific Ocean. It offers a program of readings, new music, free workshops, publishing, bookstore, archiving, and education. Learn more at beyondbaroque.org.

Beyond Baroque Literary | Arts Center

Celebrate Jose Hernandez Diaz’s new publication, Bad Mexican, Bad American, at his L.A. book launch!

Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center

Join us for the launch of Jose Hernandez Diaz's new book, Bad Mexican, Bad American. The author will be joined by Rooja Mohassessy, Jose Oseguera, L.A. Johnson, and jimmy vega. In Bad Mexican, Bad American, the minimalist, working-class aesthetic of a “disadvantaged Brown kid” takes wing in prose poems that recall and celebrate that form’s ties to Surrealism. With influences like Alberto Ríos and Ray Gonzalez on one hand and James Tate and Charles Baudelaire on the other, the collection spectacularly combines “high” art and folk art in a way that collapses those distinctions, as in the poem “My Date with Frida Kahlo”: “Frida and I had Cuban coffee and then vegetarian tacos. We sipped on mescal and black tea. At the end of the night, following an awkward silence during a conversation on Cubism, we kissed for about thirty minutes beneath a protest mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros.”Bad Mexican, Bad American demonstrates how having roots in more than one culture can be both unsettling and rich: van Gogh and Beethoven share the page with tattoos, graffiti, and rancheras; Quetzalcoatl shows up at Panda Express; a Mexican American child who has never had a Mexican American teacher may become that teacher; a parent’s “broken” English is beautiful and masterful. Blending reality with dream and humility with hope, Hernandez Diaz contributes a singing strand to the complex cultural weave that is twenty-first-century poetry.–Acre Books <h3>About the authors</h3><h3> </h3>Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020), Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024), and The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025). He teaches generative workshops for Hugo House, Lighthouse Writers Workshops, The Writer's Center, Beyond Baroque, and elsewhere. Additionally, he serves as a Poetry Mentor in The Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program. Rooja Mohassessy is an Iranian-born poet and educator. She is a MacDowell Fellow and an MFA graduate of Pacific University, Oregon. Her debut collection, When Your Sky Runs Into Mine (2023), was the winner of the 22nd Annual Elixir Poetry Award. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Poet Lore, RHINO Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, CALYX Journal, Ninth Letter, Cream City Review, The Adroit Journal, New Letters, The Florida Review, Poetry Northwest, The Pinch, The Rumpus, The Journal, and elsewhere. L. A. Johnson is the author of the chapbook Little Climates (Bull City Press, 2017). She holds an MFA from Columbia University and a PhD from the University of Southern California, where she is currently a Mellon Humanities and University of the Future postdoctoral fellow. She is the winner of the 2022 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the 2022 Greensboro Review Poetry Prize, and the 2021 Arts &amp; Letters Rumi Poetry Prize, and her poems appear in The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, and The Slowdown. She's received support for her writing from Vermont Studio Center, Community of Writers, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and elsewhere. Find more about her at http://www.la-johnson.com. jimmy vega is the child of Mexican immigrants, a Chicanx Los Angeles born and raised poet, writer, educator, artist, and curator. His debut poetry collection will be published by What Books Press in 2025. He holds an MFA from the School of Critical Studies, Creative Writing Program at CalArts, where they co-created the MFA in Creative Writing’s HYPERLINK reading series, and a B.A. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from UCLA. In 2023 their work was on view at The Reef Los Angeles as part of the group exhibit Spell/ing. He is a former 2023 ELL Faculty Fellow at CalArts and is the Associate Director of Beyond Baroque. Jose Oseguera's writing has been featured (or is forthcoming) in Sonora Review, Chautauqua, and Catamaran. His work has also won the Nancy Dew Taylor Award and placed second in the 2020 Hal Prize Contest. He's the author of the poetry collection The Milk of Your Blood (2021) as well as And This House is Only a Nest (forthcoming 2024). Masks are encouraged while inside our center.Event attendees are expected to behave in a respectful and considerate manner while in our space. Beyond Baroque reserves the right to remove individuals from our events, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, fellow attendees, or performers.Please arrive early.

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L.A. Book Launch: Bad Mexican, Bad American by Jose Hernandez Diaz

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L.A. Book Launch: Bad Mexican, Bad American by Jose Hernandez Diaz

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