Cortez and Roy Reading From New Books Mining Honey and Gordo

Jaime Cortez and Camille Roy in performance and in conversation.

Some people have to walk around with so many sad stories. They have to get up, brush their teeth, wash their face, go to work like everybody else, but they’re not like everyone else. Jaime Cortez is a wise guy with a wide heart, who sees what ‘no one else wants to see.’ These funny/tragic tales, luminescent with love, are lanterns for our dark times. —Sandra Cisneros

This is a huge book; it belongs in the canon of the best queer writers. To read Honey Mine is to be inhabited by the largesse of the word ‘lesbian,’ body, sex, sexuality. And by a lesbian aesthetic of human relations, bookended by the author’s magnificent enduring love with her late partner Angie. These fictions, in resisting…before the theorems arrive… teleological primness, parade language nimble enough to absorb class, cities, memory, grief, shame, without sacrificing a cornucopia of pleasures. Like a tarte tatin, Honey Mine spills over with deliciousness. My tactic vis a vis narrative, says Camille Roy, is really just to bring abandonment into the relationship. She succeeds marvelously. —Gail Scott

Jaime Cortez is a graphic novelist, visual artist, writer, teacher, and occasional performer. Cortez has historically used art and humor to explore sexuality, social justice, HIV/AIDS, and Chicano identity. The first ever collection of short stories by Jaime Cortez, Gordo (Black Cat/Grove Atlantic, 2021) is set in a migrant workers camp near Watsonville, California in the 1970s.

Camille Roy’s most recent book is ​Honey Mine: Collected Stories, edited by Lauren Levin and Eric Sneathen (Nightboat Books, 2021). Other books include Sherwood Forest​ (Futurepoem), ​Cheap Speech​, a play from Leroy Chapbooks, and ​Craquer​, a fictional autobiography from 2nd Story Books, as well as ​Swarm​ (fiction, from Black Star Series). She co-edited ​Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative​ (Coach House 2005, re-issued 2010). Earlier books include ​The Rosy Medallions​ (poetry and prose, from Kelsey St. Press) and ​Cold Heaven​ (plays, from Leslie Scalapino’s O Books). Recent work has been published in Amerarcana and at Open Space (SFMOMA).
This in-person event is free and open to the public; audience will be limited to half normal room capacity, and proof of vaccination and masks are required. Video of the event will be live-streamed to our YouTube channel.


Cosponsored by The Poetry Center and The Green Arcade
Supported by the National Endowment for the Arts