Word Up welcomes author Peggy Robles-Alvarado for a celebration of her latest book, Burn Me Back, published by Four Way Books, with guest readers Dr. Melissa Castillo-Garsow, Caridad De La Luz (La Bruja), and Massiel Alfonso as they explore and interrogate Latina narrative and family lore that reimagines the future from the ashes of loss.

“Let us begin by declaring that Peggy Robles-Alvarado is a magic maker. Her poetry plows under your skin until you feel your soul brimming with epiphanies. In Burn Me Back, Robles-Alvarado invites us to party with the machinations of truth-telling, and no matter how much you try to avert its gaze, there is enough lyric, enough innovative turn of phrase, enough history, enough fire, enough celestial invocation, enough family lore to make you a believer in rebirth, in salvaging what is left in the aftermath of a lineage fractured by secrets. If you ever doubted poetry’s ability to make you whole, welcome to this sublime reckoning.”—Willie Perdomo, The Crazy Bunch

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

“My Spanglish,” Peggy Robles-Alvarado declares, “drops the -s and makes it ma’ o meno’,” replaces accent marks with side-eye, “has a Tía sin papeles,” and recognizes that “there is no other way to say— / Cónchole papi, you look good!” Igniting across tongues, cultures, and countries, the incendiary poems in Burn Me Back harness the incantatory power of language through hybrid forms, preserving a beloved father’s memory, enshrining the legacy of the Latino immigrant community in Washington Heights and the Bronx, reimagining the world we share, and speaking toward a hopeful multiplicity of possible futures. At the cross section of Puerto Rican and Dominican diasporas, rooted in ancestral narratives and infused with generational dislocation, this speaker refuses to abandon what resists translation, makes the space she needs, and transforms objects as she names them: “My Spanglish knows a fire escape is also a terrace.” Yes, the language here is a feat of engineering — a design shaped by the conditions of emergency, an architecture of survival, deliverance to open air. Like isolating the notes in a thunderous chord, Robles-Alvarado dexterously teases out each word’s many meanings, listening for the individual strains that created her as she archives family lore and fleshes out her personal history, writing against patriarchy while codifying working-class wisdom. She reconstructs a whole genealogy in “What They Mean by Papers,” reciting a negative litany of “papeles.” “Not the Daily News or El Diario La Prensa, / or the kind my mother read to me on Sunday / mornings,” her “throat full of / pelitos de mango,” “Not the kind Tía Weltina used to roll her tobacco with,” “conjuring / Taíno spirits she exhaled … as she tried to memorize the national anthem,” but the kind “Uncle Rito forged” while he “learned to curl the R in his name / as if writing sacred geometry,” “the kind that convinced four of my aunts to marry older / naturalized men in exchange for an acre of my grandfather’s campo” — the kind that required the rest of their lives as payment, “their bodies, / all their milk and honey, all their amber and caña dulce / sacrificed to the lust of viejos verdes, old bastards / who soured early on too much tabaco y ron and wanted to plant / their moldy seeds in supple girls who had never seen snow.” Robles-Alvarado orchestrates the fullness of her song by refusing to leave anyone out, by making room for a term’s contradictory definitions and playing through discordant combinations until the dissonance resolves. What began as an elegy composed by a daughter lost in mourning becomes an expansive arrangement sounding rupture and repair. This music travels between loss and recovery, addiction and sobriety, the cooling embers of lost childhood and the heat of the present, this very moment in which you could reach out to the people around you and ask them to be here with you for every scalding second, the warmth of your skin against theirs posing a burning question — an invitation to burn you back.

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS

Peggy Robles-Alvarado is a Jerome Hill Foundation Fellow in Literature, a three-time International Latino Book Award winner, and a BRIO award recipient. She has earned writing fellowships from CantoMundo, Desert Nights, The Frost Place, The Ashbery Home School, VONA, Candela Playwrights, Dramatic Question Theater, and NALAC. With two master’s degrees in education and an MFA in performance studies, Peggy’s work appears in The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, ¡Manteca!, great weather for MEDIA, and What Saves Us, as well as online in Poets.org, The Quarry at Split This Rock, The Common, Tribes.org, and NACLA.org. She has been featured at Solfest Latine Theater Festival, The Dodge Poetry Festival, Lincoln Center, HBO Habla Women, The Smithsonian Institute, PEN America, Harvard University, and AWP. Through her 501(c)(3), Robleswrites Productions Inc.,she created Lalibreta.online and The Abuela Stories Project. Learn more at robleswrites.com.

Dr. Melissa Castillo-Garsow is an Associate Professor of English at Lehman College in the Bronx, NY and the CUNY Graduate Center PhD program in English specializing in Latinx Literature and Culture. She is the author/ editor of seven volumes including the poetry collection Coatlicue Eats the Apple; the anthology, ¡Manteca!: An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets; the edited volume, La Verdad: An International Dialogue on Hip Hop Latinidades; and the edited volume Scholars in COVID Times. Her most recent scholarly book project, A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture (2020), examines the creative worlds and cultural productions of Mexican migrants in New York City. Her second book of poetry, Chingona Rules (2021), was a Gold Medal Winner of the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award, International Latino Book Awards (2022). She is a poetry editor for Women Studies Quarterly, and Arts & Literature editor for Latinx Pop Magazine. To learn more visit www.drmelissacastillogarsow.com

Caridad De La Luz (La Bruja) won an Emmy in 2022 and in the same year became the Executive Director of the NUYORICAN POETS CAFE where she began her career in 1996. Caridad has balanced her career of activism, education, spirituality and entertainment. She received the Puerto Rican Women Legacy Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award from The Bronx Historical Society and was honored as A Bronx Living Legend. She was named “Top 20 Puerto Rican Women Everyone Should Know”.

Massiel Alfonso is a Dominican author, award-winning poet, and multidisciplinary artist who believes stories are medicine. Her debut, Handful of Poems, dives deep into human emotions with honesty and simplicity, earning First Place at the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards and Honorable Mention at the International Latino Book Awards. Through poetry, performance, and community workshops, Massiel creates art that challenges societal norms and makes space for conversations about beauty, identity, and change. Massiel focuses on documenting her existence through storytelling, as a reminder that we exist and our art deserves to exist too.