Author: Vickie Vertiz

Auto/Body (A/B) was reviewed at so many great journals this late Winter and Spring.

At the Poetry Foundation, DIEGO BÁEZ wrote:

“Auto/Body by Vickie Vértiz draws on the ostentatious beauty and raw power of Los Angeles car culture to interrogate constructions of gender and family dynamics within a Latinx context. Several maximalist poems appear spread across the page, great swathes of text with jags and stripes excised. “Desfile,” shaped like a shield with a diagonal banner of whitespace drawn across it, depicts East L.A.’s Mexican Independence Day Parade, a celebration of contradictions, in a blend of English and Spanish[.]” Read the rest of the review here.

At Alta, David Ullin wrote “Where We Are Now,” that includes A/B:

Like Taylor, Vickie Vértiz is writing from the crossing point of history, where the individual and the landscape intersect. “Have you / noticed,” she asks in “Anther,” a poem in her second full-length collection, Auto/Body (she is also the author of the chapbook Swallows), “how the / strobe light is also / a searchlight. The same / way we are surveilled is how we / celebrate.”

And for the most automotively incisive and detailed review yet, “‘AUTO/BODY’: DRIVING FORCE,” by GUS BERG

“Transmission presents a final question: Given a finite amount of energy, where should we channel our outrage, and how should we conserve our resources? When our bodies begin to fall apart, how can we keep going before reaching our final destination?”

Thank you, Alta, Poetry Foundation, and Zyzzyva!

Buy Auto/Body here!

“Y el agua, Chabelita?” I asked. “How do you use it in your home?”
“Yo la cuido,” she said. “La conservo. Estamos en una sequía.”

Excited to share my latest essay on #southeastla, featuring Jose Ornelas and his son Edgar (pictured in the cover image) of Ornelas Produce, the last farmer in Bell Gardens, and on Maywood environmentalist, mother to @aida_writes and her 6 siblings, Isabel Salazar Viramontes, que en paz descanse.

Read the PDF here.

An excerpt:
“The 710 Freeway exit for Atlantic/Bandini Boulevard takes you past huge warehouses and railroad tracks between the City of Commerce and Vernon, just a few blocks from Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles. The semis and eighteen-wheelers snake their way past small cars and into the broad streets. […] A few hundred feet past these giants are tens of thousands of children, mothers, grandparents, business owners, politicians, artists, and environmentalists. Isabel Salazar Viramontes can say she has been and is, many of these things. People call her Señora Chabelita.”

Check out the farmer’s market schedule for Ornelas Produce in the article. And although the piece was written a couple of years ago, all the information is still somehow timely and relevant.

Qué viva Chabelita!

Thank you to the Rivers and Mountains Conservancy and to Jane Tsong at the watershedconservationauthority for working with me. 

You have to read Carribean Fragoza’s debut short story collection, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You.

Here’s a photo from that adventure. Stay tuned for the whole interview coming soon on Libros’ Youtube channel. Get a copy of his book from City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. This stunningly original collection of stories, published by City Lights Publishers, illuminates a spectrum of Latinx, Chicanx, and immigrant women’s voices. In confrontations with fraught matrilineal lines, absent or abusive fathers, and the effects of historical violence, these women and girls navigate a male-dominated world where they rely on a resilient mujer network to get them through sometimes supernatural obstacles

After months of conversations with multiple stakeholders, my article on the SELA Cultural Center is now up on KCET’s website. I am grateful to everyone who I spoke with. I hope the ideas, concerns, and hopes of the Southeast LA community come across clearly and help shape the way forward with this ambitious project. 

Excerpt:

What is the SELA Cultural Arts Center?

If it comes to fruition, the Southeast Los Angeles Cultural Arts Center will be located off Imperial Highway at the Lynwood/South Gate border, near the confluence of the Rio Hondo and the Los Angeles Rivers in South Gate. Its website claims that it will be “a multi-arts facility that weaves together world-class design and high-caliber programming from across Los Angeles County with the vibrant culture of the surrounding community.” This project, designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry and his firm, will have to raise at least $150 million to reach its completion goal for 2024.

The Center is actually a complex, not a single building. In an email, architect and partner Sam Gehry said the project is “envisioned as a series of buildings of various size[s].”The environmental agency leading the project is the San Gabriel and Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy (the Conservancy), specifically Mark Stanley, its Executive Officer and his staff. The project is currently in its programming and tenant selection phase. Stanley wants to hear input from residents who are just learning about the Center to get as many additional artists, community members and especially young people involved in shaping it. Decisions regarding who will own the building are also on the agenda, though Stanley noted that the ideal scenario would be a county-owned park structure, like the Ford Amphitheater.

It all sounds like a great idea: couple the talent and drive of Southeast L.A.’s artist communities with the clear need for more green space and the opportunity to capture more rainwater to build a community asset, but residents are sounding the gentrification alarm. They’re concerned that the Center will open the floodgates for additional development, including the Rio Hondo Confluence Area’s multiple, park projects, some of which are also suggested in the LA River Master Plan and in its website, which residents fear will displace everyone these projects are for. The stakes are high for Southeast L.A. cities, already plagued with high COVID cases, climbing rents, overcrowding and some of the most polluted land in the country.

Read the full article here.

Watch my short interview with Cara Santa Maria of SoCal Update to get a synopsis of the article at the link below:

SoCal Update interview link.

The American Legion Hall Post #465 has been a gathering place for decades.

Read about the Hall’s history, the music, and the people who keep it alive here at KCET!

In the 1950s, Eddie Cochran wrote the song “Summertime Blues” while he lived in Bell Gardens on Priory Street. Revelers from all backgrounds have danced at the Hall to legendary Wanda Jackson. They’ve screamed lyrics back to iconic punk band The Zeros. Most recently, they bopped and strolled at the rockabilly party Fuss ‘n’ Holler and to songs by and the Crown City Bombers.

And if you have an event coming up, you can rent the hall from feisty Hall Manager Rita Sykes if you live in the area for less than $1000. Huge thank you to Shizu Saldamando, Commerce historian and archivist Joseph Calderon, the Cochran Club organizers, especially cartoonist and writer Rafael Navarro, Max Espinoza, Ruben Gerard, and Robert Fernandez. Que viva Bell Gardens!

“Sometimes, I catch myself wondering if that roll I felt under my feet is the beginning of the end. I look up from my computer and notice how my fear nearly wishes the Big One into life. I go back to writing, that other job that doesn’t end. I hope the Big One is a lie—a way to scare ourselves into being ready for the worst. Maybe the worst has already happened. I can’t tell you what that is yet.”

Read the rest at USC’s new journal AIR/LIGHT magazine.

Join us! All are free events.

Friday, April 19, 2019, Skylight Books, 7pm. Book release parties for Kenji Liu‘s _Monsters I Have Been_ (Alice James Books) and Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes‘ _The Inheritance of Haunting_, winner of the 2019 Andres Montoya Poetry Prize.

LIBRO MOBILE. Saturday, April 20, 2019, 5-7pm. A reading celebrating Heidi Restrepo Rhodes’ The Inheritance of Haunting and Kenji Liu’s Monsters I Have Been. 220 E. 4th Street, Ste. 107, Santa Ana, Ca.

VERSES & VINO. Friday, March 1, 2019,  8pm-10pm, at Stokely’s Café and Social House, 3500 W. Pico Blvd. LA 90019

Thanks to the poet and teacher TC Tolbert, my poem “Only We Make Beautiful Things Just to Destroy Them” is up at the Academy of American Poets! Click here to listen, read, and share.

It’s important for us to remember what we’ve survived, like the Bracero Program and past anti-immigrant violence, so that even in the midst of more trauma from racism, sexism, and rising fascism, we can persist and resist.

To bring me to your campus in person, or virtually, visit this page to learn more.

An excerpt:

“What’s a layer of confetti and candy compared to DDT The kind you sprayed over all our naked bodies/   We’re diamonds: hard, shiny, and we/ Get processed to go through We don’t infest, pendejo. We invest/  There goes your friend again, diving toward/  The paleta, which has to be pineapple flavor”

Recently, PEN America announced the winners of the 2018 PEN America Literary Awards for books of note for writers living west of the Mississippi River. With much excitement, I’d like to share that my collection Palm Frond with its Throat Cut was selected for the poetry award! I’m extremely moved since the book is a collection of many voices: brothers, mothers, our freeways, the land we work and live on, loves comes and gone, all of them working-class, resilient, and beautiful.

LA, this book is for all of us who make this place what it is.

The PEN America Literary Awards are juried by panels of award-winning writers, editors, booksellers, and critics. PEN America has honored many outstanding writers in literature across genre, such as children’s literature, drama, essays, fiction, poetry, science writing, and sports writing. To learn more about Pen America, visit their website.

This year, the shortlist included amazing works by:

Mary Jo Bang, ​A Doll for Throwing​ (Graywolf Press)
Henry Wei Leung, ​Goddess of Democracy​ (Omnidawn Publishing)
Danez Smith, ​Don’t Call Us Dead​ (Graywolf Press)

Thank you to judges Ari Banias, Sarah Manguso, and Ocean Vuong.

Our books will be celebrated at the 2018 LitFest Gala on November 2nd, 2018 at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, CA. To read more about the winners, visit PEN America here.

Gracias KXCI 91.3 FM, public radio in #Tucson where you can listen to me and Daniel Olivas read stories about our exes, our fathers, and our neighbors on the  Tucson Festival of Books panel, “Borderlands New Wave Poetry.” The discussion began with an introduction by the amazing social justice activist and consultant Sarita Gonzales.

Listen here!Con la Virginia Grise and Prof. Michelle Tellez at the Tucson Festival of Books, 2018.

Photo: Michelle Tellez.

Absolutely beautiful review of Palm Frond by the LA Review of Books via Isabel Gomez from Umass Boston. Thank you, Isabel and LARB!!

At Entropy, Palm Frond also made the list of best poetry collections this year! This list is FIRE, gracias ENTROPY.

At Remezcla, Dr. Ruben Quesada lists Palm Frond with other titles on youth and Latinx identity in the US. The list also includes Javier Zamora, Christopher Soto (Loma), and Veronica Reyes, Reyna Grande, David Tomas Martinez, and Willie Perdomo. What an honor to be included!

Read the entire list here!

“Latinx stories add to our ongoing understanding of the human experience. Latinx culture embodies a connection to and from the Caribbean islands, Mexico, Central and South America. We live in a world that would be poorer without these complex identities.”

A story about illusion and iluciones after college graduation. “Vete a la Chingada Party“:

“I close my eyes and I’m a pair of legs in a brown satin skirt. I’m finally a college graduate, and this is my welcome home party, but my friends don’t know it yet. Yes, they’ve forgotten to call or invite me to look for records in Whittier. Yes, they hang out with Beto my ex who cheated on me, but they haven’t seen me in a miniskirt.”

Now at Rabid Oak Journal, from Cal State Bakersfield. Thank you, CSUB!

From the Harriet Blog, via the Poetry Foundation:

At Bitch Magazine: In “Fierce as Fuck: The Future of Poetry Is Brown & Queer,” Soraya Membreno talks with Vickie Vértiz, author of Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut (University of Arizona Press, 2017); and Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, author of Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, 2017).

Click here to read the full interview.

I’m gonna get right to the list in a second here, but I just want to tell you all how excited I am that all these writers are out there creating their amazing art and that publishers like Topside Press, Arsenal Pulp Press, Kegedonce Press, and Metonymy Press are putting it out into the world. […]

via Six Canadian Trans Women Writers You Should Know — Casey the Canadian Lesbrarian

Image from Anthropoid website.

A tia gives limpias and embroiders magic. A short play published in late December, “Ruda,” an experimental play inside a litany of remedios.

Many thanks to Melissa Sipin-Gabon for this opportunity.

Excerpt:

TÍA: Someone gave you mal de ojo.

CHATA: A cabron. Why?

TÍA: Why else? Because they’re jealous.

CHATA: Of what?

TÍA: Ay mija. Everything. Your godmother especially.

CHATA: (Disappointed, but not surprised) So what do I do?

TÍA: Come. [Tía walks out to her small, raised bed garden. Chata follows as Tía picks rosemary and rue stems. The light outside is bright. They walk back inside.]

We’re gonna pray.

I’m the Aztec God of War. Relentless ash, the devil at my elbow. I consume lick-flames hotter than your vieja. But I hold your hand. Love you like you are the only one. The last piece of steak in chile verde. The last slice of chocolate flan. That’s how you left me, gordo.

En el zócalo y sola. A creature that can do anything.

-From “Portrait as a Couple: Mexico City.” Click here for more poems.