Tag Archives: Author Reading

Word Up at Alianza Dominicana Cultural Center: Alejandro Heredia’s LOCA with Elizabeth Acevedo

Thursday, March 6, 2025 – 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Alianza Dominicana Cultural Center
530 W 166th St
New YorkNY 10032

 

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Word Up Community Bookshop and Dominican Writers Association invite you to celebrate the debut release of Loca by Alejandro Heredia. In conversation with Heredia will be award-winning author Elizabeth Acevedo. There will be a limited signing after the event.

“In a novel that is as tender as it is brilliant, Heredia writes with ferocity and warmth.”—Elizabeth Acevedo

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket.

Alianza Dominican Cultural Center is located at 530 West 166th Street New York, NY 10032. The event will take place on the second floor, which is accessible by an elevator.

ABOUT THE BOOK

If Junot Diaz’s critically acclaimed collection Drown and Janet Mock’s Emmy-winning series Pose produced offspring, Alejandro Heredia’s Loca would be their firstborn.

It’s 1999, and best friends Sal and Charo are striving to hold on to their dreams in a New York determined to grind them down. Sal is a book-loving science nerd trying to grow beyond his dead-end job in a new city, but he’s held back by tragic memories from his past in Santo Domingo. Free-spirited Charo is surprised to find herself a mother at twenty-five, partnered with a controlling man, working at the same supermarket for years, her world shrunk to the very domesticity she thought she’d escaped in her old country. When Sal finds love at a gay club one night, both his and Charo’s worlds unexpectedly open up to a vibrant social circle that pushes them to reckon with what they owe to their own selves, pasts, futures, and, always, each other.

Loca follows one daring year in the lives of young people living at the edge of their own patience and desires. With expansive grace, it reveals both the grueling conditions that force people to migrate and the possibility of friendship as home when family, nations, and identity groups fall short.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alejandro Heredia is a writer from the Bronx. He has received fellowships from LAMBDA Literary, Dominican Studies Institute, UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in fiction from Hunter College. Loca is his debut novel.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Elizabeth Acevedo is the current Young People’s Poet Laureate and the New York Times-bestselling author of The Poet X, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Pura Belpré Award, the Carnegie medal, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and the Walter Award. She is also the author of With the Fire on High—which was named a best book of the year by the New York Public Library, NPR, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal—and Clap When You Land, which was a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor book and a Kirkus finalist. She holds a BA in Performing Arts from The George Washington University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. Acevedo has been a fellow of Cave Canem, Cantomundo, and a participant in the Callaloo Writer’s Workshops. She is a National Poetry Slam Champion, and resides in Washington, DC with her loves.

Word Up: Alec Karakatsanis’s COPAGANDA

Wednesday, April 16, 2025 – 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Word Up Community Bookshop / Librería Comunitaria
2113 Amsterdam Ave. & 165th St.
New YorkNY 10032

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Word Up welcomes prizewinning civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis to discuss his new book Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, a powerful warning about how the media manipulates public perception, fueling fear and inequality, while distracting us from what truly matters.

“Alec Karakatsanis exposes our criminal injustice system for what it is: a bureaucracy of punishment, propped up by a biased media machine that feeds mass incarceration. After Copaganda, you’ll never read the news the same way again.” –Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket with 30 max attendees. Please register in advance.

In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees for this event must wear a mask inside.

Word Up Community Bookshop is located at 2113 Amsterdam Ave. (& 165th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 168th St and the A/C train to 163rd or 168th  St.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In this groundbreaking expose, essential for understanding the rising authoritarian mindset, award-winning civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis introduces the concept of “Copaganda.” He defines Copaganda as a special kind of propaganda employed by police, prosecutors, and news media that stokes fear of police-recorded crime and distorts society’s responses to it. Every day, mass media manipulates our perception of what keeps us safe and contributes to a culture fearful of poor people, strangers, immigrants, unhoused people, and people of color. The result is more and more authoritarian state repression, more inequality, and huge profits for the massive public and private punishment bureaucracy.

For readers of Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky, Copaganda documents how modern news coverage fuels insecurity against these groups and shifts our focus away from the policies that would help us improve people’s lives–things like affordable housing, adequate healthcare, early childhood education, and climate-friendly city planning.

Recognized by Teen Vogue as “one of the most prominent voices” on the criminal legal system, Karakatsanis brings his sharp legal expertise, trenchant political analysis, and humorous storytelling to drastically alter the way we consume information, while offering a hopeful path forward. One towards a healed humanity–and media system–with a vested interest in public safety and equality.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A former public defender, Alec Karakatsanis is the founder of the Civil Rights Corps, an organization designed to advocate for racial justice and bring systemic civil rights cases on behalf of impoverished people. He was named the 2016 Trial Lawyer of the Year by Public Justice and was awarded the Stephen B. Bright Award for contributions to indigent defense in the South by Gideon’s Promise. The author of Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System (The New Press), he lives in Washington, DC.


Fountain Bookshop – Book Talk: The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places

Join us at The Fountain Bookshop for an inspiring author talk, Q&A, and signing with Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, author of The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places.

In this powerful exploration of Brooklyn and Oakland and the importance of community spaces everywhere, Bendiner-Viani blends photography and prose, sharing the stories of residents who give us a personal, intimate view of their neighborhoods. Through their eyes, we witness the vital, often overlooked places that shape our cities – and sometimes, are lost to gentrification and displacement.

Don’t miss this chance to hear from the author herself about the making of this evocative book! 📘💫
🗓️Saturday, February 1st, 2025
⏱️4:00 PM
📍The Fountain Bookshop, 803 w 187th st, NYC (A train to 181 or 190th!)

Word Up at Highbridge Park – It’s My Park Day: Celebrating Faith Ringgold’s TAR BEACH

Saturday, November 16, 2024 – 11:00am to 1:00pm
Raoul Wallenberg Playground (in Highbridge Park)
Amsterdam Avenue & 188th/189th St.
New YorkNY 10032

Storytelling by Esperanza Martell & Musical Performance by Guy Bisserette

Join us on It’s My Park Day to plant bulbs in the Pollinator Garden, to learn about stewardship, and to enjoy poetry, literature, and music with your neighbors! All supplies will be provided. Copies of Faith Ringgold’s picture book Tar Beach will be given away while supplies last.

Organized by Connectemonos; Partnerships for Parks; New York Restoration Project; Word Up Community Bookshop; Catholic Charities Community Services NY–Alianza; Pluma Poética del Arte; ADEUSA; We Run Uptown; OnPoint NYC.

Tar Beach By Faith Ringgold Cover Image
$8.99
ISBN: 9780517885444
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Dragonfly Books – December 3rd, 1996

Hudson View Gardens Lounge: Bloom Readings

“Bloom Readings presents “A September Reading – Two Authors/Two New Books!”, Saturday, September 21st, 6:00 pm, in The Lounge at Hudson View Gardens, just west of the intersection of 183rd St. & Pinehurst Ave. Tickets are $10, and can be purchased in advance with Venmo: @wicked-rufous-press.

Sarah Van Arsdale is a fiction writer, poet, and artist living in New York and Oaxaca, Mexico. Her seventh book, Catch and Release, (Finishing Line Press, 2024) is a book-length poem about the human impact on the sea life in Mexico, levied by Van Arsdale’s watercolor illustrations. Her first novel, Toward Amnesia, was published by Riverhead Books in 1995. She is the author of three other books of fiction: Blue, winner of the Peter Taylor Prize for the novel (2003 University of Tennessee Press);  Grand Isle (SUNY Press, 2012) a novella collection, In Case of Emergency, Break Glass (Queens Ferry Press, 2016), and another book-length poem, The Catamount (Nomadic Press, 2016). She’s assistant director of the Ferro-Grumley Award in LGBTQ Fiction, and she teaches creative writing in the low-residency MFA program at Antioch University.

David Ebenbach is the author of ten books of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, including his new novel Possible Happiness, called “a beautiful coming-of-age novel” by Booklist, in a starred review. His books have won such awards as the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the Juniper Prize, among others. His fiction and poetry have also been published in numerous magazines, including The Kenyon ReviewAsimov’s Science Fiction, and The New England Review. He lives with his family in Washington, DC, where he teaches creative writing and literature at Georgetown University. You can find out more at davidebenbach.com

For more information visit BloomReadings.net, or email us at bloomreadings80@gmail.com