Word Up welcomes back Roberto Carlos Garcia to celebrate his debut essay collection Traveling Freely, which explores American faults through the eyes of a Dominican American. In conversation with Garcia will be JP Infante.
“Garcia walks through the world as a poet, seeing the invisible aspects of the human condition that he writes with familiarity and integrity. Reporting from the inside, not the outside, the poetic voice within these essays simply sings.” —Randall Horton, author of Dead Weight
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 Traveling Freely: Essays, Roberto Carlos Garcia explores intersecting topics such as race, identity, American socioeconomic inequality, police violence, our inability to partake in our culture as innocents, and our complicity as Americans in all that’s wrong with the United States from the author’s specific vantage point as a Black Dominican American man. The voice in these essays is both clear and nuanced, and as readers move through the collection, the various themes cohere into a multilayered investigation of institutional racism and the inherent exploitations of capitalism.
In essays that are uniquely straightforward and accessible, Garcia insists that in order to resist state-sanctioned violence against marginalized bodies and populations, we must understand our shared history of oppression—so that we can rise against it effectively and find new paths forward.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ROBERTO CARLOS GARCIA is the author of several books, including What Can I Tell You? Selected Poems, as well as the founder of Get Fresh Books Publishing, a literary nonprofit. The recipient of a 2023 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, he writes about the Afro-Latinx and Afro-diasporic experience. His work has been published in Poetry Magazine, NACLA, The Root, Poets & Writers, and the anthology BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, among others.
ABOUT THE MODERATOR
JP Infante is the author of On the Tip of Your Mother’s Tongue and Aquí y Allá: un retrato de la comunidad Dominicana en Washington Heights. He is the winner of PEN’s Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and Thirty West’s Chapbook contest. His writing has appeared in Kweli, The Poetry Project, Rigorous, A Gathering of the Tribes, and elsewhere. He has been awarded scholarships and fellowships from the NY State Writers Institute, PEN America and The Center for Fiction. He holds an MFA from The New School.
