7:00 PM, Friday, 23 February 2024

Sponsored by Red Salmon Arts

Join us for a reading by José Alaniz from his recent book, Puro Pinche True Fictions

The hybrid book collects short stories and comics, mostly set in the Rio Grande Valley along the Texas/Mexico border. The stories reflect the author’s upbringing in this region as a second-generation Mexican-American, at times fusing folk beliefs with Bradbury-style science fiction. For example, “Tamales” sets the immigration narrative on Mars in 2063, when a migrant family makes the crossing in search of work via (malfunctioning) rocket.

José Alaniz was born in Edinburg, TX, in the Rio Grande Valley along the US/Mexico border. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1993 with dual degrees in Radio-Television-Film Production and Russian Studies. He worked in Moscow, Russia as a journalist from 1993-1994. In 2003 he earned a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

He has released three comics/prose collections: The Phantom Zone and Other Stories (2020) and The Compleat Moscow Calling (2023), both from Amatl Comix, and Puro Pinche True Fictions (2023, FlowerSong Press). His comics have also appeared in The Stranger, the Seattle anthology Dune, Tales From La Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology (2018), BorderX: A Crisis in Graphic Detail (2020) and SCARFFF.

FMI: www.flowersongpress.com/store-j9lRp/p/puro-pinche-true-fictions-prose-comics-by-jos-alaniz

Red Salmon Arts is a 501(c)3 grassroots cultural arts organization, with a thirty-year history of working with the indigenous neighborhoods of Austin. RSA is dedicated to the development of emerging writers and the promotion of Chicanx/@/Latinx/@/Native American literature, providing outlets and mechanisms for cultural exchange, and sharing in the retrieval of a people’s cultural heritage with a commitment to social justice.