Our Voices Our Stories SF presents Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Ingrid Rojas Contreras will join OVOSSF founder Lisa D. Gray in a conversation about her novel Conteras’ novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree. About OVOSsf Our Voices, Our Stories SF began in 2014 with 16 amazing writers and four engaging book chats one of which featured Natalie Bazile of Queen Sugar Fame and the legendary Eunetta Boone, the first black woman showrunner on the Disney Channel. We bring you high-quality authors eager to share and discuss their work.

The evening culminates in a book chat between Lisa D. Gray (the Founder and Curator of this landmark series), and one or more of the authors. The authors write across genres, so when you come, you hear everything from fiction to travel writing and poetry to memoir. These women’s stories paint vivid pictures of what it’s like to live in the world as a woman of color. They explore themes and topics everyone can relate to and understand.

About Ingrid Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree (Doubleday) is an Indie Next selection, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed, Nylon, and Guernica, among others. Rojas Contreras has received numerous awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, VONA, Hedgebrook, The Camargo Foundation, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture. She is the book columnist for KQED, the Bay Area’s NPR affiliate. She teaches writing at the University of San Francisco, and works with immigrant high school students as part of a San Francisco Arts Commission initiative bringing writers into public schools. She is working on a family memoir about her grandfather, a curandero from Colombia who it was said had the power to move clouds.

Fruit of the Drunken Tree Seven-year-old Chula and her older sister Cassandra enjoy carefree lives thanks to their gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation.

Inspired by the author’s own life, and told through the alternating perspectives of the willful Chula and the achingly hopeful Petrona, Fruit of the Drunken Tree contrasts two very different, but inextricable coming-of-age stories. In lush prose, Rojas Contreras sheds light on the impossible choices women are often forced to make in the face of violence and the unexpected connections that can blossom out of desperation.

About Lisa Lisa D. Gray is a writer, curator, and social justice warrior who loves to cook and sees possibilities waiting to burst free in bubbles blown into air. Her interests range from dancing (her first career goal: Rockette) to star gazing, and if an animal lived with her, it’d be a turtle. She writes about the things that intrigue and perplex her and does it with humor and insight. She earned an MFA from Mills College and completed a residency at the Vermont Studio Center and a fellowship at The Fine Arts Works Center. Her work appears in the As Us Literary Journal. Mission at Tenth and the anthology New Haven Noir for which she won an Edgar Award in 2018. She’s a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto and a Fellow at The Ruby in San Francisco. She is completing her first novel.

We encourage you to purchase the book using the PURCHASE BOOKS link on our website. Books sales will also occur on site.