Cristina Rivera Garza and Kit Schluter: March 4, 2021

Kit Schluter, after introducing Salones de Belleza / The Beauty Salons, a forthcoming bilingual anthology of international poets that he'd recently edited based on the Aeromoto reading series in Mexico City, reads three stories, with brief prefatory comments, from his series called Cartoons. He reads "Either, The Man with Bushes on His Palms; or, Oh, the Bushes," "Parable of the Perfect Translator," and "30th Birthday Story."

Cristina Rivera Garza reads and comments on her poems, from early and later work, all written in Spanish and more recently translated to English, including work translated by Sarah Booker, from the book Grieving. She reads (all in English translation) "The Feminists," "Borderline Personality," "The Claimant" (described as a documentary poem, using the words of journalist Sandra Rodriguez and of Luz María Dávila, from Grieving), two recent poems still in progress, based on her research for her novel Autobiografía del algodôn (Autobiography of Cotton), mining the work of anthropologist James C. Scott in Against the Grain, "Domus" and "Our Austere Monastery," and closes her reading with her poem "Keep Writing" (also from Grieving, tr. Sarah Booker).

Novelist Carolina de Robertis, as emcee, thanks Rivera Garza and Schluter for their readings, then asks them to each speak of their various locations "between" languages and cultures. Rivera Garza in her response cites Jalal Toufic, and his work The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster. Asked by de Robertis if they have questions for one another, Schluter asks Rivera about the feminists in her novel The Iliac Crest (La Cresta de Ilión) who are devoted to Mexican writer Amparo Dávila, and the status of feminism in Mexico. Rivera Garza responds by asking Schluter about his cultural work as a US-American writer living in Mexico City.