Mazza Writer in Residence Juliana Delgado Lopera with Joseph Cassara, reading and in conversation

Juliana Delgado Lopera and Joseph Cassara
“I could write simply, pero tengo la lengua salada”
Juliana Delgado Lopera

For the concluding event as Mazza Writer in Residence at The Poetry Center for Spring 2019, Juliana Delgado Lopera will be reading and in conversation with novelist Joseph Cassara, author of The House of Impossible Beauties, an acclaimed debut novel that “follows the lives of the major players in New York’s 1980s drag ball scene, made famous by Jennie Livingston’s 1990 film Paris Is Burning.” (full review at The Guardian) Supported by the Sam Mazza Foundation, this event is free and open to the public.

“I could write simply, pero tengo la lengua salada” (*) is the title for Juliana Delgado Lopera’s Mazza Residency with The Poetry Center. Prior to this evening with Joseph Cassara, she’ll by joined by special guest Monique Jenkinson, aka Fauxnique, for an “afternoon of literary drag,” Saturday April 27 at The Bindery, annex of The Booksmith and just across Haight Street, and will be visiting multiple classes at SF State, in Women and Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, and Creative Writing, throughout the week of April 22.

Juliana Delgado Lopera is an award-winning Colombian writer, historian, speaker, and performance artist based in San Francisco. The recipient of the 2014 Jackson Literary award, she’s the author of Quiéreme (Nomadic Press 2017) and ¡Cuéntamelo!, an illustrated bilingual collection of oral histories by LGBT Latinx immigrants which won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award and a 2018 Independent Publisher Book Award. She’s received fellowships from Brush Creek Foundation of the Arts, Lambda Literary Foundation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and The SF Grotto, and an individual artist grant from the SF Arts Commission. She’s the recipient of the 2016 Jeanne Córdova Words Scholarship. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Eleven Eleven, Foglifter, Four Way Review, Broadly, and TimeOut Magto name a few. She’s the creative director of RADAR Productions a queer literary non-profit in San Francisco. Much more at julianadlopera.com

• Make sure to check out Juliana Delgado Lopera’s recent Ted Talk, “The Poetry of Everyday Speech,” which took place early this year at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Joseph Cassara is the author of The House of Impossible Beauties, which won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award for Best Fiction Book of 2018, is a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction, and was chosen by Barnes & Noble as a Discover Great New Writers selection. He holds degrees from Columbia University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has received fellowships from the Macdowell Colony and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He currently lives in Fresno, where he is an Assistant Professor of English at the California State University, Fresno. More at josephcassara.com

(*”but my tongue is salty”)

Related event:

Mazza Writer in Residence
Juliana Delgado Lopera with Monique Jenkinson, aka Fauxnique
an afternoon of literary drag
Saturday APRIL 27
3:00 pm @ The Bindery (door + bar at 2:00 pm)
1727 Haight Street (at Cole), San Francisco
free and open to the public
supported by the Sam Mazza Foundation

Event contact:
The Poetry Center
Event email:
poetry@sfsu.edu
Event phone:
415-338-2227
Event sponsor:
The Poetry Center, Mazza Writer in Residence project