Join us for the launch of Vanessa Angélica Villarreal's Magical/Realism on Monday, September 30, at 144 Montague St and via Zoom! Doors will open for a wine reception for in-person guests at 5 PM and we'll kick off the evening with Villarreal in conversation with Carina del Valle Schorske at 5:30 PM. The event will be emceed by Marina Weiss. Book signing to follow.
This event is free and open to the public. In-person attendees can reserve a copy of Magical/Realism with their registration.
If purchasing a copy of Magical/Realism is financially inaccessible to you, a limited number of copies are available for free. Please send your request to [email protected].
Note that by attending this event, you agree to abide by our code of conduct and COVID-19 policy below. All in-person attendees for events are currently required to wear masks (regardless of vaccination status) except readers at a safe distance on stage. We will have masks available. Our full policy can be found at the end of the event description. Brooklyn Poets reserves the right to dismiss from our programs any participant found to be in violation of these policies. Thank you for respecting our community.
Closed captions will be available for the event through the Zoom livestream. For more information and to request additional accommodations, contact us at [email protected].
About Magical/Realism
A brilliant, singular collection of essays that looks to music, fantasy, and pop culture—from Beyoncé to Game of Thrones—to excavate and reimagine what has been disappeared by migration and colonialism.
Upon becoming a new mother, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was called to Mexico to reconnect with her ancestors and recover her grandmother’s story, only to return to the sudden loss of her marriage, home, and reality.
In Magical/Realism, Villarreal crosses into the erasure of memory and self, fragmented by migration, borders, and colonial and intimate violence, reconstructing her story with pieces of American pop culture, and the music, video games, and fantasy that have helped her make sense of it all.
The border between the real and imagined is a speculative space where we can remember, or re-world, what has been lost—and each chapter engages in this essential project of world-building. In one essay, Villarreal examines her own gender performativity through Nirvana and Selena; in another, she offers a radical but crucial racial reading of Jon Snow in Game of Thrones; and throughout the collection, she explores how fantasy can help us interpret and heal when grief feels insurmountable. She reflects on the moments of her life that are too painful to remember—her difficult adolescence, her role as the eldest daughter of Mexican immigrants, her divorce—and finds a way to archive her history and map her future(s) with the hope and joy of fantasy and magical thinking.
Magical/Realism is a wise, tender, and essential collection that carves a path toward a new way of remembering and telling our stories—broadening our understanding of what memoir and cultural criticism can be.
About the Author
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the essay collection Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders (Tiny Reparations Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2024) and the poetry collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, 2017). She is a recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination and the winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine’s The Cut, Harper’s Bazaar, Oxford American, Paris Review, Poetry Magazine and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and holds a doctorate in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she lives with her son and a loyal dog. Find her on Twitter @Vanessid.
In conversation with:
Carina del Valle Schorske is a writer and translator of Puerto Rican poetry. Her work has been published in many venues including the Believer, Bookforum, the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine, where she is a Contributing Writer. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2022, and her debut essay collection, The Other Island, is forthcoming from Riverhead.