"From Borderlands to Bathhouses": A Live Reading with Jesús I. Valles and Ricardo Bracho

In this live reading and conversation, playwrights Jesús I. Valles and Ricardo A. Bracho will engage the U.S./Mexico borderlands and bathhouses as insurgent geographies of queer Latinx life. Putting excerpts from two of Jesús’s plays in conversation with one another, the playwrights consider their personal experiences as queer artist-scholars whose work reflects on colonial hauntings, familial memories, and erotic desires. Their reading and conversation will be followed by a Q&A with the audience.

JESÚS I. VALLES (THEY/THEM) is a queer Mexican immigrant, educator, storyteller, and performer from Cd. Juarez/El Paso. Jesús is a 2021 CantoMundo fellowship recipient at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, a 2019 Lambda Literary fellow, a 2019 Walter E. Dakin Playwriting Fellow of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a recipient of the 2019 Letras Latinas Scholarship from the Community of Writers’ Poetry Workshop, and a poetry fellow at Idyllwild Arts Writers Week. Jesús is also a 2018 Undocupoets Fellow, a 2018 Tin House Scholar, a fellow of The 2018 Poetry Incubator, and the runner-up in the 2017 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. Their work has been published in The Shade Journal, The Texas Review, The New Republic, Palabritas, The Acentos Review, Quarterly West, The Mississippi Review, Palette, The Adroit Journal, BOAAT, The McNeese Review, and PANK. Their poetry has also been featured on NPR’s Code Switch, The Slowdown, The BreakBeat Poets’ LatiNext Anthology, and the Best New Poets 2020 anthology. As an actor, they are the recipient of four B. Iden Payne Awards, including Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama (2018), and Outstanding Original Script (2018) and they were nominated for the Mark David Cohen New Play Award for their play, (Un)Documents. They most recently starred as Penny Marshall in Victor I. Cazares’ Pinching Pennies with Penny Marshall: Death Rituals for Penny Marshall for New York Theatre Workshop. Jesús was OUTSider festival’s first OUTsider-in-residence and is currently an MFA playwriting student at Brown University. Their plays include (Un)documents, bala.fruta, a river, its mouths, and bathhouse.pptx.

 

RICARDO A. BRACHO (HE/HIM) is a writer, editor and teacher who has worked in community and university, theater and video/film, politics and aesthetics for the past twenty-nine years. His other academic appointments include Visiting Multicultural Faculty at The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago and Artist-Scholar in Residence at the Center for Chicano Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His award-winning plays, which include The Sweetest Hangover, Sissy, Puto and Mexican Psychotic have been produced in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, as well as workshopped and staged nationwide. His focus in community has been on social justice, public health, and the arts with queer and trans youth of color, Latina/o/x high risk populations, queer men of color, and incarcerated men. He has been a participant in the National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group residency program as well as with Mabou Mines. He is currently compiling his selected plays for publication as well as at work on Operation Space Maize, an intergalactic queer comedy and love story about Los Angeles and Galaxy 1-B. In addition to his residency at the Alice Paul Center, Ricardo is affiliated faculty in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program.

Lunch will be provided after the conversation

Co-Sponsored by:

• La Casa Latina
• Africana Center
• Sachs Program for Arts Innovation 
• Mellon Just Futures Dispossession in the Americas Grant
• Kelly Writers House
• Department of English
• Center for Experimental Ethnography

For more info, please go to Kelly Writers House website.