SANTA BARBARA — The Santa Barbara Museum of Art to present ” Parallel Stories Lecture: Alex Espinoza — Dismantling Hierarchies,” at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, March 10 at 1130 State St., Santa Barbara.
Described by Sandra Cisneros as “capable of renewing one’s faith in new fiction,” Alex Espinoza’s writing is filled with a sense of place and longing, and an idiosyncratic search for love, meaning, and unflinching truth. In an afternoon of reading and conversation, the author shares his thoughts on Southern California, masks, identity, cultural displacement, faith, the world of lucha libre, belonging, and why what should exclude us, empowers us.
$5 SBMA Members/$10 Non-Members/$6 Senior Non-Members
Purchase tickets at the Museum Visitor Services desk, or online at tickets.sbma.net.
Links:
LA Review of Books
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-second-act-of-alex-espinoza/
More about Alex Espinoza:
Alex Espinoza was born in Tijuana, Mexico to parents from the state of Michoacán and raised in suburban Los Angeles. In high school and afterwards, he worked a series of retail jobs, selling everything from eggs and milk to used appliances, custom furniture, rock T-shirts, and body jewelry. After graduating from the University of California-Riverside, he went on to earn an MFA from UC-Irvine’s Program in Writing. His first novel, Still Water Saints, was published by Random House in 2007 and was named a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection. The book was released simultaneously in Spanish, under the title Los santos de Agua Mansa, California, translated by Lilliana Valenzuela. His second novel, The Five Acts of Diego León, was published by Random House in March 2013. Alex’s fiction has appeared in several anthologies and journals, including Inlandia: A Literary Journey Through California’s Inland Empire, Latinos in Lotusland, Huizache, Silent Voices, The Southern California Review, Flaunt, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. His essays have been published at Salon.com, in the New York Times Magazine, in The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity, in The Los Angeles Review of Books, and as part of the historic Chicano Chapbook Series. He has also reviewed books for the Los Angeles Times, the American Book Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and NPR. His awards include a 2009 Margaret Bridgeman Fellowship in Fiction to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a 2014 Fellowship in Prose from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a 2014 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for The Five Acts of Diego León.