Jaime Cortez and Camille Roy

Jaime Cortez and Camille Roy, at The Green Arcade

Friday, October 22, 2021
Event Time 07:00 p.m. - 08:00 p.m. PT
Cost
Location The Green Arcade, 1680 Market Street, San Francisco
Contact Email poetry@sfsu.edu

Overview

Supported by the National Endowment for the Arts

Cosponsored by The Poetry Center and The Green Arcade

  • Video live-streamed to our YouTube channel. Media captioning available there after the event.

Join us on-site at The Green Arcade (where Market Street, Gough, Valencia, and Haight all intersect) for a reading of new prose works by local s/heroes Jaime Cortez and Camille Roy. The evening event is cosponsored by The Poetry Center and The Green Arcade. 

  • Some people have to walk around with so many sad stories. They have to get up, brush their teeth, wash their face, go to work like everybody else, but they’re not like everyone else. Jaime Cortez is a wise guy with a wide heart, who sees what ‘no one else wants to see.’ These funny/tragic tales, luminescent with love, are lanterns for our dark times. —Sandra Cisneros
     
  • What a voice, what a charming, idiosyncratic voice! Cortez tells the untold stories of California. Set what you know aside, lay your expectations on the couch next to you, put your feet up, pick up this book, and journey into land as real and complex as the state itself.—Rabih Alameddine
     
  • This is a huge book; it belongs in the canon of the best queer writers. To read Honey Mine is to be inhabited by the largesse of the word ‘lesbian,’ body, sex, sexuality. And by a lesbian aesthetic of human relations, bookended by the author’s magnificent enduring love with her late partner Angie. These fictions, in resisting…before the theorems arrive… teleological primness, parade language nimble enough to absorb class, cities, memory, grief, shame, without sacrificing a cornucopia of pleasures. Like a tarte tatin, Honey Mine spills over with deliciousness. My tactic vis a vis narrative, says Camille Roy, is really just to bring abandonment into the relationship. She succeeds marvelously. —Gail Scott

Jaime Cortez is a graphic novelist, visual artist, writer, teacher, and occasional performer. Cortez has historically used art and humor to explore sexuality, social justice, HIV/AIDS, and Chicano identity. The first-ever collection of short stories by Jaime Cortez, Gordo (Black Cat/Grove Atlantic, 2021) is set in a migrant workers camp near Watsonville, California in the 1970s. 

Camille Roy’s most recent book is ​Honey Mine: Collected Stories, edited by Lauren Levin and Eric Sneathen (Nightboat Books, 2021). Other books include Sherwood Forest​ (Futurepoem), ​Cheap Speech​, a play from Leroy Chapbooks, and ​Craquer​, a fictional autobiography from 2nd Story Books, as well as ​Swarm​ (fiction, from Black Star Series). She co-edited ​Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative​ (Coach House 2005, re-issued 2010). Earlier books include ​The Rosy Medallions​ (poetry and prose, from Kelsey St. Press) and ​Cold Heaven​ (plays, from Leslie Scalapino’s O Books). Recent work has been published in Amerarcana and at Open Space (SFMOMA).

Event contact: 

The Poetry Center

Event phone: 

415-338-2227

Event sponsor: 

The Poetry Center and The Green Arcade

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