Surviving Illegality; Imagining Otherwise | poetry reading

In the organizer's words:

Poet and transdisciplinary artist, Alan Pelaez Lopez, crossed the U.S.-Mexico border at the age of 5 and lived as an "undocumented" / "illegal" immigrant for nearly two decades. Surviving Illegality; Imagining Otherwise is a poetry reading and salon that invites audiences to become a witness to the everyday textures of someone who is Black, Zapotec, and queer. The reading will consist of published and unpublished pieces around the themes of migration, surveillance, queer intimacy, and resisting hegemonic, imperialist, and fascist regimes. Following the reading, Alan will facilitate a salon conversation where we gather as a temporally bound community/kin to reflect on what it might mean to imagine otherwise as we survive political violence, and, if such imagination is possible in the absence of a collective.

Alan Pelaez Lopez born 1993 in Mexico, is a transdisciplinary artist and writer whose work addresses the legal conditions of forced migration and land dispossession in North America. Pelaez Lopez has recently exhibited collages, installations, and intervention art at Harvard University's Art Wing, Galerija Škuc, EFA Project Space, and in public spaces. They are a recipient of a Brown University Art Practitioner Fellowship, a Museum of the African Diaspora poet-in-residence position, and a New York University Miriam Jiménez Román fellowship.

Pelaez Lopez is the author of Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020), a finalist for the International Latino Book Award, to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020), and the editor of When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent (University of Arizona, 2023).

They are also an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, and holding a PhD.

POETRY READING & SALON 21.01.2025 19:00
WITH Alan Pelaez Lopez
LANGUAGE The event takes place in English (poems include Spanish and French)
FREE ENTRY Donations welcome
ACCESS Our space is accessible by wheelchair

FUNDING This project is made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.