Tune in to our Facebook Live stream to welcome Carribean Fragoza to discuss her new book of short stories, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, a collection of surreal and gothic tales rooted in Chicane and Latine culture. She will be joined by local writer and actor Jordanna Hernandez!
About Eat the Mouth That Feeds You:
Carribean Fragoza's imperfect characters are drawn with a sympathetic tenderness as they struggle against circumstances and conditions designed to defeat them. A young woman returns home from college, only to pick up exactly where she left off: a smart girl in a rundown town with no future. A mother reflects on the pain and pleasures of being inexorably consumed by her small daughter, whose penchant for ingesting grandma's letters has extended to taking bites of her actual flesh. A brother and sister watch anxiously as their distraught mother takes an ax to their old furniture, and then to the backyard fence, until finally she attacks the family's beloved lime tree.
Victories are excavated from the rubble of personal hardship, and women's wisdom is brutally forged from the violence of history that continues to unfold on both sides of the US-Mexico border.
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Growing up in the peripheries of the Greater LA region and outside of Chicano communities of East LA that have largely come to define Chicano identity, including in culture and literature, has shaped Carribean Fragoza's literary approach. Rather than sticking to usual tropes of Chicanx and Latinx writing, she breaks onto new thematic territory with unique character voices and perspectives. As a graduate of the Creative Writing MFA program at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), she pushes the boundaries of Chicanx literature using experimental approaches and devices and freely borrows from international queer and feminist literary movements. She has published fiction and poetry in publications such as BOMB Magazine, Huizache, Entropy, Palabra Literary Magazine and Emohippus. Her arts/culture reviews and essays have been published in online national and international magazines such as the Aperture, Los Angeles Review of Books, L.A. Weekly, KCET, Culture Strike, and Tropics of Meta. She is also the founder and co-director of the South El Monte Art Posse (SEMAP), a multi-disciplinary arts collective.
Jordanna Hernandez is a queer, Chicane actor, writer, and educator. She’s a company member of 4615 Theatre Company and has performed at Ford’s Theatre, Imagination Stage, Olney Theatre, and Spooky Action Theatre. She tells stories of Chicane culture, of daughters and their mothers, of first-generation Americans, socio-economic inequality, of mental health, of queerness, of the traumatized, of self-love and healing, and of those yet to be seen. Her mission is to find light within darkness, transform it into art and heal the world. She enjoys introspective conversations, tennis, spicy food, and flossing.
Eat the Mouth That Feeds You is available at Lost City Books!