On March 22, 2023, Award-winning Mexican American poet, writer, and professor Vickie Vértiz began a book tour for her newest poetry collection Auto/Body, winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry. With seven events over the course of nine weeks, Vértiz will read with many local authors during her visits to independent bookstores and venues across the Los Angeles area.
“The fierceness in Auto/Body does not relent, whether in its crisp memory-capture or in its attention to legacy, to present, to future in its constant ache and rift of loveliness and tumult,” says author and poet Khadijah Queen.
Auto/Body connects the vulnerability of the queer body to the language of auto mechanics in order to explore what it means to repair and to keep going even when rebuilding feels impossible. The poems in Auto/Body challenge readers to turn inward and reflect: What needs changing? How do our bodies transcend ways of being we have received so that we may become more ourselves?
Vertiz has scheduled events at the following locations in the Los Angeles area:
- March 22, 7–9 PM, Skylight Books, with Angela Peñaredondo and Cynthia Dewi Oka
- March 26, 5–7 PM, Stories Books and Cafe, with Angela Peñaredondo, Heidi Restrepo Rhodes, and Erin Mizrahi.
- April 2, 11 AM–12PM, Thinking Its Presence Conference, Pomona College, with Carribean Fragoza, Jimmy Vega, and Heidi Restrepo Rhodes
- April 4 , 6–8 PM, Altadena Main Public Library, with Angela Peñaredondo
- April 29, 4–6PM, LibroMobile, Santa Ana (outdoors), with Heidi Restrepo Rhodes
- May 6, 12:301:30 PM, Pasadena LitFest, “Queer Writers Tracing Literary Ancestries,” with Angela Peñaredondo, Heidi Restrepo Rhodes, and Cynthia Dewi Oka
- May 20, 4 PM, Re/Arte Centro Literario Boyle Heights, with Manuel Paul Lopez
Auto/Body is available wherever books are sold. We encourage you to buy the book at your local independent bookstore either in-person or online.
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For more information, or for a review copy, contact Michelle Sybert, University of Notre Dame Press, msybert@nd.edu, 574-631-4905.