Read with the Lit & Luz Book Club!
Join the Lit & Luz Book Club/Club de lectura this fall at the National Museum of Mexican Art. The esteemed local reading group is hosted this year by author and performer Angelica Davila and is an opportunity for Chicagoans to read and discuss some of today’s most exciting contemporary Mexican and Mexican American authors in both Spanish and English. Book club participants will also be able to explore themes from the book through a writing or art exercise. This year’s authors include two 2025-26 Lit & Luz Festival Collaboration Cohort participants who will join us in Chicago this fall.
Acompáñanos al Lit & Luz Book Club/Club de lectura este otoño en el Museo Nacional de Arte Mexicano. El prestigioso grupo de lectura local estará presentado este año por la autora y artista Angelica Julia Dávila y es una oportunidad para que los habitantes de Chicago lean y debatan sobre algunos de los autores mexicanos y mexicoamericanos contemporáneos más interesantes de la actualidad, tanto en español como en inglés. Entre los autores de este año se encuentran dos participantes del Grupo de Colaboración 2025-26, quienes nos acompañarán en Chicago este otoño.
Black Box Named Like to Me by Diana Garza Islas, Translated by Cal Paule
(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024)
They Will Dream in the Garden by Gabriela Damián Miravete, Translated by Adrian Demopulo (Rosarium Publishing, 2023)
Find these titles at your local book shop,
including the 2024 Lit & Luz Book Club Partner Pilsen Community Books
Click here to join the book club today!
Black Box Named Like to Me by Diana Garza Islas, Translated by Cal Paule (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024)
National Museum of Mexican art, 1852 W 19th St, Chicago, IL
Wednesday September 3
6:00 - 7:00 pm CT
Join the book club to receive event links.
About the Book:
Black Box Named Like to Me challenges the limits of syntax and image to hold the full scope of the imaginary in its grasp, touching on questions of motherhood, the future, memory, and the acquisition of language. The page is a zone for play, here, both in the translation and the original Spanish; words and ideas undergo radical transformation to best serve the purpose of the poems, shapeshifting at will. Vocal momentum drives these poems onward and outward with a force that is just as funny as it is poignant. It is Garza Islas’s first book, and the first to be translated into English.
About the Author & Translator:
Diana Garza Islas (Santiago, Nuevo León, México, 1985) is the author of Caja negra que se llame como a mí (Bonobos), Adiós y buenas tardes, Condesita Quitanieve (El Palacio de la Fatalidad), and Catálogo razonado de alambremaderitas para hembra con monóculo y posible calavera (Conarte). Excerpts from this yellow cycle of books can be found in the anthology En el fondo todo poema es yo de niña mirándola (La Cleta Cartonera). She published El sol es verde si lo miras (UANL) as part of a green cycle of books. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Primer infolio de las Vidas reunidas de Almería Smarck (UAEMEX) and La czarigüeya escribe (An.Alfa.Beta).
Cal Paule is a translator, poet, and teacher from Saint Paul, MN. Their work has appeared in Waxwing, Reading in Translation, Asymptote, and elsewhere. They are an MFA candidate in literary translation at the University of Arkansas, where they are the comics editor at The Arkansas International. They teach gender studies.
Praise for the book:
“Black Box Named Like to Me feels at first like a fever dream. But over time, these poems—sharp, fleet-footed, almost synesthetically intense—urge us into a state of heightened lucidity. Again and again, Diana Garza Islas's exuberant, kinetic intelligence remind us that language acquisition—in children, yes, but also in writers and readers of poems—is always an inventive act. The work of this wonderfully strange and brilliant poet is both celebrated and transformed, as every good translator must do, by Cal Paule: their English translation darts and winks, scampers and slinks, watches itself thinking aloud, and continually makes itself anew.”—Robin Myers
“These are vivid, bright, imaginative poems that have an irresistibly ironic and yet delicate way of approaching the reader through both narration and imagery, prose poetry and versification. The translator has succeeded in bringing the love for language across, along with the subtle and ambiguous relationship of the speaker with poetry (the push and pull, the silence and the chaos, the brutality, and the tenderness).”–Asymptote
“In such a striated, complex nebulae of words, populated with verdure, colour, animal life, and geographical wonder, these poems are a veritable atlas, a world in which language is as alive as the creatures it represents.”—Xiao Yue Shan
“...I particularly admire how [Paule] handled the challenges encountered in Garza Islas’ poems, especially the idiosyncratic syntax, the portmanteaus and neologisms, the surprising linguistic juxtapositions. [Paule] navigates linguistic and cultural demands with a keen attention to how semantic disruptions in the original may be ‘mediated’ and recreated into English and for an audience that might feel, as I do, excitedly disoriented.”—Mihaela Moscaliuc
They Will Dream in the Garden by Gabriela Damián Miravete, Translated by Adrian Demopulo (Rosarium Publishing, 2023)
National Museum of Mexican art, 1852 W 19th St, Chicago, IL
Wednesday November 5
6:00 - 7:00 pm CT
Join the book club to receive event links.
About the Book:
In They Will Dream in the Garden, Otherwise Award-winning author, Gabriela Damián Miravete elaborates the disconcerting experience of living as a woman in Mexico—a territory characterized by its great contrasts, from violence and activism to affectionate and communal resistance: flowers that arise from the earth to expand the cosmic consciousness of those who take it, nuns who create artifacts so that their native languages do not perish, a memorial for the victims of femicide that the State controls, but whose old guardian wants to turn into a laboratory to return their lost future…
They Will Dream in the Garden shows the journey that its author has undertaken towards a more conscious writing that, through wonder and beauty, trusts in the possibilities that literature offers to unite, question, and transform our being in the world.
About the Author & Translator:
Gabriela Damián Miravete is a Mexican writer, editor, and scriptwriter. She also works as a culture journalist, writing about literature and film for publications including Letras Libres, Lee+, Cine Premiere, and Confabulario. Her literary work has been recognized in Mexico and the United States. Her book of children's stories La tradición de Judas [The tradition of Judas], illustrated by Cecilia Varela, was awarded the Premio de Cuento en la Feria del Libro Infantil y Juvenil de la Ciudad de México. In 2010, she won a Jóvenes Creadores grant for narrative and wrote the short story collection Pequeños naipes de ópalo [Little opal playing cards]. In 2012, she was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award for her story "Future Nereid," which was featured in the anthology Three Messages and a Warning. Her essays and stories have been translated to English and Portuguese.
Adrian Demopulos was born in Dallas, Texas. She graduated from the University of Oklahoma with BAs in Spanish and communication. In the fall, she will be pursuing an MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa. Her translations have appeared in Latin American Literature Today and in the anthology A Larger Reality: Speculative Fiction from the Bicultural Margins by The Mexicanx Initiative.
Praise for the book:
"They Will Dream in the Garden is a devastating fever dream of a collection. Lyrical and lush, but also startlingly direct. A major book from a unique voice. A must read."—Jeff VanderMeer
"Gabriela Damián Miravete is arguably one of the most important writers of speculative fiction in Mexico, and her collection, They Will Dream in the Garden, showcases the breadth and depth of her work. Ranging from a bemused humanism reminiscent of Le Guin to disarming surrealism that reminds one of Murakami, these eleven stories are also deeply rooted in Mexico as place and culture and history. Damián Miravete masterfully wields semantics and syntax, trope and scheme, to draw us through unexpected layers in every piece, like delicate palimpsests that yield upon close observation startling phrases containing unforgettable truths. And balancing this technical skill is an emotional resonance, perhaps best felt in the harrowing and moving title story. They Will Dream in the Garden is a must-have for readers of literary and genre fiction alike, and let us hope that Gabriela captivates with such tales for many more years to come."—David Bowles, award-winning author of The Prince & the Coyote
"Spun of nightmares and spiderwebs, This collection of stories by the Mexican author Gabriela Damián Miravete stretches from its roots in the Surrealist Movement to encompass the best and the worst of human imagination. Miravete brings us visions of worlds where animals and humans connect in mutual respect, women are valued for their abilities to empathize and collectively provide solutions, and the dead reach out to support the living in our daily worries. In addition, the collection includes the best psychotropic adventure story I have read. Every page of They Will Dream in the Garden is drenched in images of water. Every story gives us a chance to re-imagine ourselves in a world where feminism has won out against the evils of the drug trade, of patriarchy, and of machismo. If only. But we can dream."—Kathleen Alcalá, author of Spirits of the Ordinary
"Luminous stories, haunted with memories as deep as the roots of the oldest ahuehuete, They Will Dream in the Garden is charged with a sense of justice that shows the world as it is, and as it could be." —Christopher Brown, Philip K. Dick Award-nominated author of Tropic of Kansas
"In They Will Dream in the Garden, Gabriela Damián Miravete takes the speculative genres and makes them her own, so specific to Mexico but with that fairy tale quality of being anywhere or nowhere. This is a magnificent collection of short stories, with characters full of determination to invent and fashion with the tools they have, that never forgets that humans are the species that "praises beauty while destroying it."—Matthew David Goodwin, editor of Latinx Rising and co-editor of Speculative Fiction for Dreamers
For questions about groups, content, or other, contact
Frances Lee, Frances@makemag.org
If you’re looking for additional recommendations, please check out these past book club titles:
