Woodland Pattern Book Center will welcome a pair of Latinx poets on Saturday, May 18, as part of its ongoing series, “Unwriting Borders: Latinx Voices in the U.S.” Latinx is a gender-neutral moniker used in lieu of Latino or Latina that emerged from American Spanish, reportedly first used online in 2004. While this attempt to use more inclusive language to refer to individuals of Latin American heritage opened an important conversation surrounding the intersectionality of our identity, it has also served as another example of the long and complex history of misperception that America’s Latinx community must struggle against.
By chance, eloquent and distinctive poetic voices allow for accessible conversations around identity that bridge age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender. Poet and critic Lila Zemborain authored multiple multilingual poetry collections and anthologies. Zemborain is an Argentine-born poet who has lived in New York City since 1985, where she served as the director of New York University’s Creative Writing in Spanish Program from 2009 to 2012. Her poetry explores Latinx and American culture and the tangled intersections of each person’s lived experiences.
First-generation American poet Elias Sepulveda preferences abstract wordplay to explore the personal, social and political struggles that have shaped his experiences as the son of Mexican immigrants. Sepulveda, who moved to Wisconsin from Los Angeles more than 20 years ago, is a graduate of UW-Milwaukee’s program in language, literature and translation, and his layered writings are at once intimate and reflective.
Zemborain and Sepulveda will perform live readings as Woodland Pattern Book Center, 720 E. Locust St., at 7 p.m. on Saturday, May 18.
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