Reading Series November 2024

7 PM CDT - Join us at Lawndale Art Center on November 15th at 7pm for our next reading series event featuring JD Pluecker and UH student readers Camilo Roldan, Erika Said, and Gerardo Cardenas. This will be a bilingual reading in conjunction with the University of Houston's Spanish Creative Writing Program!

Please join us on November 15th at 7pm (doors open at 6:30). 

Please note:
N95 and KN95 masks are strongly encouraged. Social distancing is encouraged.

JD Pluecker works with language, that is, a material thing, a thing of life and history. Her non-disciplinary work inhabits the intersections of writing, history, art, performance, bookmaking, queer/trans aesthetics, non-normative poetics, language justice, and cross-border cultural production. She has published numerous books translated from Spanish to English, including Antígona González (Les Figues Press, 2016), Basura de Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny (Deep Vellum Press, 2023), and I n Defense of Common Life: The Political Thought of Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar (Common Notions, 2024). JD has published three books of poetry: The Every Wild (Mouthfeel Press, 2024), Grin Go Home / Las provincias internas (Editorial Ultramarina, 2024), and Ford Over (Noemi Press, 2016). In 2019, Lawndale Art Center supported the publication of the artist’s book, The Unsettlements: Dad . From 2010-2020, he worked with the transdisciplinary collaborative Antena Aire and from 2015-2020 with the local social justice performance collective Antena Houston. JD edits plaquettes with the Ugly Duckling Presse’s Señal series, is a recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writing Grant, and has exhibited his work at the Blaffer Museum, Hammer Museum, Project Row Houses, among other venues. More information can be found at www.jdpluecker.com  and www.antenaantena.org .

Camilo Roldan is a bilingual Colombian-American translator and poet. He is the author of the English language poetry collection Dropout (Ornithopter Press, 2019) and the Spanish collection El último soneto y nos vamos (HAO, 2021). His translation of María Paz Guerrero’s book Dios también es una perra was published by the UDP Señal Series in 2020 as God is a Bitch Too. His poems and translations have appeared in various magazines and journals. He is an Inprint Fondren Foundation Fellow and an Assistant Editor at Gulf Coast.

Erika Said was born in the beach town of Ciudad Madero, Mexico. She crossed the border through Ciudad Juárez-El Paso and considers herself a Mexitejana. Erika wrote the poetry collection "iPoems: Poemas En Shuffle" (El Humo, 2014), co-authored “Fuego del Aire” (Bookanero Ediciones, 2017) and signed two bilingual children's books with Arte Público Press. Her upcoming chapbook “Postcards from the border” (Mouthfeel Press, 2025) will be her first publication fully in English. Her Spanish poetry, short stories and non-fiction is published in print magazines, anthologies and academic journals in Mexico and the United States. She is a doctoral candidate of the Spanish Creative Writing program at the University of Houston, where she works as a Research Assistant, writes a novel and raises her toddler daughter.

Gerardo Cardenas is a writer, editor, cultural promoter, journalist, and communications strategist. As a journalist, he was a foreign correspondent for Notimex, Mexico’s wire service, in the United States, Belgium and Spain. After settling in Chicago, he was a reporter and assignment editor for Hoy, Chicago’s only Spanish-language daily newspaper, and the founder and editorial director of Contratiempo, the most important Spanish-language literary monthly magazine in the Midwest.