Leah Flax Barber and Cristina Pérez Díaz
@ Pilsen Community Books
1102 W 18th St, Chicago, IL 60608
Opening Tuesday, May 13th, at 7PM
We’re excited to welcome poets Leah Flax Barber and Cristina Pérez Díaz to the store for a reading and discussion in celebration of their new books The Mirror of Simple Souls and From the Founding of the Country. Haunted by the violent legacies of colonialism on both landscape and bodies, Pérez Díaz’s first book of poems, The Founding of The Country, is simultaneously utopian dream and post-colonial critique, deliriously dreaming with the foundation of a country from the bed of two lovers. In her first book of poems, The Mirror of Simple Souls, Flax Barber revives an actress figure of the commedia dell’arte to consider her own destiny as a soon-to-be historical subject. In these brutally compressed poems, the performance of writing is charged with the eros and anxiety of coming after.
Leah Flax Barber is a writer from Chicago. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in Conjunctions, Cleveland Review of Books, The Common, Peach Mag, and Reading in Translation. The Mirror of Simple Souls (Winter Editions, 2025) is her first book.
Cristina Pérez Díaz is a Puerto Rican writer and translator who holds degrees in Classics and Philosophy. Her translation of José Watanabe’s Antígona won the 2023 ASTR Translation Prize. She teaches Comparative Literature at the University of Puerto Rico (Río Piedras). Her poems and translations have appeared in Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Hayden’s Ferry, Eterna Cadencia, and Periódico de Poesía, among other journals. From the Founding of the Country (Winter Editions, 2025) is her first book of poetry.
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Tags: Chicago, Cristina Pérez Díaz, Leah Flax Barber, Leah Flax Barber and Cristina Pérez Díaz, Lower West Side, Pilsen Community Books
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