Just spent a few days at the University of Notre Dame's The Art of Encounter Symposium. @natalia.trevino.writer , @mkelsonauthor , and I guided participants in mini-ekphrastic poetry workshops! It was wonderful to revisit the @raclinmurphymuseum . Lots of poems brewing!
Thanks to @fjaragon2011 and @letraslatinasblog2 the literary initiative of the Institute of Latino Studies, for the support and sponsorship.
#NotreDame #ArtOfEncounter #EkphrasticPoetry #PoetryWorkshops #RaclinMurphyMuseum #LiteraryArts #LetrasLatinas #LatinoStudies #CreativeWriting #CulturalExchange
Thanks to @crookedlanebooks and @kcandaliterary for getting behind a 2024 mystery/thriller where a US citizen gets swept up in an immigration raid...if we put the scary headlines in story context, where empathy lives, maybe the truth will come to us at last.
Left Coast Crime coming to SFO! See you at the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero. Some authors are going to see Dashiel Hammett's typewriter at the SF Public Library on Weds. By Thursday, they'll have magical powers!
#crimefiction #thrillerbooks #garyphillips #naomihirahara
Holding this with so much gratitude.
Honorable Mention for the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award in English for Dreamer Paradise — my first full-length collection.
I began writing this book in 2019. It was published in 2024. And now, in 2025, it sits here recognized. That kind of timeline teaches you patience. It teaches you faith in your own voice.
This book was born from 2016 and onward — from DACA, from uncertainty, from loving this country while questioning it. The fact that those poems still resonate in today’s political climate reminds me why we write. Why we archive. Why we tell the truth.
Thank you to What Books Press for walking this journey with me.
And thank you to Maria Kelson for keeping Dreamer Paradise alive in conversation — for her seven-day close reading and for calling me a flexible poet who merges art with writing. That affirmation stays.
This is part of the legacy now.
And the work continues. My second collection arrives in August. #immigrantstories #latinobookawards #dreamerparadise #daca
Three winners get TWO BOOKS EACH, because Mexicans are coming to take your shelf space: a copy of Maria Kelson's debut mystery/thriller NOT THE KILLING KIND and David Quiroz's debut poetry collection DREAMER PARADISE. These books are not pa' todos! But they may be for you! Mira: the exec. producer and creator of Netflix's Selena: The Series says DREAMER PARADISE "transforms a day laborer's gay son into a poignant love letter...it beckons us to find our place in this world." Publisher's Weekly on NOT THE KILLING KIND: "A stirring debut novel...Kelson loads the plot with satisfying twists." You'll get poetry about living, working, and loving with contested legal status (DACA) and a thriller about a Mexican-American education reformer trying to save her school from takeover by a hostile board while defending her son, who was wrongfully jailed for the murder of a former student.
TO ENTER:
Follow @mkelsonauthor@qdapoet
-Like and save this post
-Comment and tag some friends who love thrillers, poetry, #latinebooks, or getting 📚 on ❤️ Day
-Share in your stories, tag us and post a 🌟 here every time you share!
TERMS:
Must be 18+ with a U.S. shipping address, willing to share mailing address via DM if you win. Giveaway is completely free and sponsored by us, the authors!
Giveaway ends Feb. 14 at 5pm MST
BEST OF LUCK!!
QOTD: What's a favorite poetry or fiction book you read (or wrote!) in the past year that challenges narrow, mainstream ideas or identities?
#thriller #mystery #poetryisnotdead #bookgiveaways
Really pushing the bounds of what the Instagram algo can grock ... but for any humans who care about human and wild religion, love, mothers, sons, animals, seasons, poetry, migration, immigration, the magic of sound and breath...I got you!!
A bookaholic Mexican-American mystery writer bringin' you Day 2 of 7 poems in 7 days. I still love talking about poetry! I still love reading it! Even though it has been a long, lukewarm minute since I put any of my own out there in the world. I was busy writing my first mystery thriller for twelve years, and now I'm writing my next. (Maybe I can cut my process time in half?!) But poetry feeds us, and I'll never leave it behind completely. OK: it's time to answer a question the little Hater in My Head has been nagging me to answer: why this book, Dreamer Paradise, for these 7 days? Why not seven different books, when there are so many fantastic books of poetry by writers speaking to our moment? Because when I wrote Not the Killing Kind, a novel about an education reformer trying to help immigrant families, I knew it contributed to only one small corner of the 3D dodecahedron that is our human conversation about migration, neighborliness, and the dangers we can bring to each other...and I knew voices speaking more directly about experiences with US immigration need to be heard loud and clear. The speaker in Dreamer Paradise is loud and clear and lyrical on the poetics of living on a knife edge with perilous status in the U.S. The poems teach by example. They strengthen our hearts right when we need it: today. #poetry #latine #immigration #kindledeals #thriller
