Tag Archives: Author Talk

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 Recirculation: LOST PATHS by Juan R. Valdez

Tuesday, March 18, 2025 – 7:00pm to 8:00pm
RECIRCULATION A project of Word Up
876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.)
New York , NY 10032

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We invite you to a reading with author Juan R. Valdez for his book Sendas extraviadas: Ensayos para vici en el mundo que nos queda (UAM, 2024), about the position of human beings on a planet Earth on the brink of destruction. We have been dragged to this critical point by unbridled consumerism and capitalism, and by our all-too-human inability to resolve the very sociopolitical ills we create. 

Lost Paths represents an effort to make a meaningful and creative textual contribution to what he calls “the planetary superconsciousness.” This is nothing less than the full contemplation of the problems and wonders of this world that transcends temporal and territorial boundaries and seeks, above all, to do no more harm.

This event has a suggested donation of $5, with a maximum of 30 attendees. Please register in advance.

In accordance with Word Up community safety guidelines, all attendees of this event are required to wear a mask in the store.

Word Up Community Bookshop is located at 2113 Amsterdam Ave. (and 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 AUTHOR

Juan R. Valdez is a writer, teacher, and hiker. He was born in Santo Domingo and raised in the Bronx. His work is part of a tradition of maroon intellectuals and socio-naturalists who wander freely between the city and the mountains, between literature and science. He is a graduate of the CUNY Graduate Center.

United Palace: Literature to Life stage presentation of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter

Date: Monday, January 27th | Doors: 6:30pm | Performance followed by talkback: 7–8:30pm | $20 general admission

Literature to Life adapts Erika L. Sánchez’s YA novel as their newest title in their Signature Performance series. This title will be co-produced in partnership with Freedom Reads, the only organization in the nation transforming the experience of incarceration by opening libraries in prison housing facilities. I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter takes place in modern day Chicago. The novel focuses on the idea of finding one’s own identity, and breaking free from societal, cultural, and familial expectations.

United Palace of Cultural Arts presents
Literature to Life stage presentation of
I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter
By Erika L. Sánchez
Performed by Elizabeth Raquel Ramirez
Adapted and Directed by Ana Maria Jomolca

Based on the novel I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, © 2017

Production produced in partnership with Freedom Reads.

Elizabeth Raquel Ramirez is a proud Hispanic actress from San Antonio, Texas. Her credits include In The Heights at Oklahoma City University and two award-winning shorts, Most Likely To and Dream Carriers. She is most known for her contribution to the HBOMax documentary Homeschool Musical: Class of 2020, produced by Tony Award winner Laura Benanti.

LITERATURE TO LIFE (LTL) is a performance-based literacy program that presents professionally staged verbatim adaptations of American literary classics. LTL’s mission is to perform great books that inspire young people to read and become authors of their own lives. LTL was founded more than three decades ago as the educational program of the American Place Theatre. Now an independent organization, this mighty collective of artists and educators brings the voices of diverse authors to thousands of students and audiences nationwide, giving them the tools to become the empowered “voices worth hearing” of our future. www.literaturetolife.org | @lit2life

 

 

Word Up Recirculation: Jaha Marie Dukureh’s I WILL SCREAM TO THE WORLD with Melissa Mahtani

Sunday, March 16, 2025 – 4:00pm to 5:30pm
RECIRCULATION A project of Word Up
876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.)
New YorkNY 10032

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Word Up welcomes Jaha Marie Dukureh to celebrate her new memoir I Will Scream to the World: My Story. My Fight. My Hope for Girls Everywhere. This extraordinary memoir details the monumental journey of one young Gambian woman from survivor of FGM and forced child marriage, to global activist and political leader who became UN Women’s first Goodwill Ambassador for Africa, one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, and among the youngest people nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In conversation with Dukureh will be reporter Melissa Mahtani.

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket with 50 max attendees. Please register in advance. 

In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees are encouraged to stay masked at all time.

Recirculation, a project of Word Up Community Bookshop, is located at 876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 157th St., A/C train to 163rd St., and the M4 and M5 to Broadway and 159/160th.

ABOUT THE BOOK

On the wedding night of her first arranged marriage, fifteen-year-old Jaha learned that she had undergone Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as an infant. That painful discovery, coupled with her experiences with a second arranged marriage, set Jaha on her path as an activist—a courageous mission that would require her to brave hostility in her community and family, and even attempts on her life.

Despite the challenges, and with ever-growing determination, Jaha founded Safe Hands for Girls, an organization that succeeded in having FGM banned in Gambia. She is now working to eradicate FGM and forced child marriage worldwide by 2030 and running to be the next President of The Gambia.

I Will Scream to the World! recounts Jaha’s ongoing, uphill journey to be seen as a survivor, activist, but most of all as a human. She dives into her childhood to show the root causes of her crusading, shares her personal and professional life, and explores, as only a survivor can, a practice that while violent and troubling, is often culturally misunderstood.

Above all, Jaha’s unflinchingly honest memoir is a story of resilience and extraordinary fearlessness, of the strength that comes with learning to love oneself, and of the power within everyone to create meaningful and lasting change.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jaha Marie Dukureh is a Gambian American women’s rights activist, survivor of FGM and forced child marriage, Regional UN Women Goodwill Ambassador for Africa, and one of the youngest Africans ever to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She is the founder of Safe Hands for Girls, an organization dedicated to providing support to African women and girls who have survived Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), and was the lead campaigner in The Guardian’s End FGM Guardian Global Media Campaign. Her work contributed directly to the Gambian Government’s 2015 ban on FGM, and she is currently building the African-led network The Big Sisters Movement with the mission to end FGM and child marriage by 2030. Named to the TIME 100 list of the most influential people in the world, Ms. Dukureh has been awarded the Eleanor Roosevelt Medal of Honor, honored as the Human Rights Activist Humanitarian of the Year at the seventh annual African Diaspora Awards, recognized as one of the top 100 gender global policy influencers by Apolitical, and named one of the top 10 Africa Changemakers by YouthHubAfrica. She currently lives outside New York City and can be found online at Jaha365.com.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Melissa Mahtani is an Emmy-nominated executive producer of CBS News. She joined in April 2024 with nearly two decades of experience, including international reporting, producing content for multiple platforms and innovating storytelling. She most recently served as a senior producer and reporter for CNN.