The Library is pleased to offer a new and unique panel in partnership with the New York City Regional Chapter of the Authors Guild. Join us for an exploration of what happens when a writer's imagination moves into worlds and identities that lie beyond expected parameters. Participants will consider the significance of extra-experiential writing for the writer's own creativity as well as its impact on the larger literary community.

Roberto Carlos Garcia writes about the Afro-Latinx and Afro-Diasporic experience. His work has been published widely in places like Poetry, the Root, the BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT, and others. He is the author of five books, including four poetry collections—Melancolía (Cervena Barva Press, 2016); black / Maybe: An Afro Lyric (Willow Books, 2018); [Elegies] (FlowerSong Press, 2020); and the recently published What Can I Tell You: The Selected Poems of Roberto Carlos Garcia (Flowersong Press, 2022)—and one essay collection, Traveling Freely, forthcoming in 2024 from Northwestern University Press. Roberto is the founder of Get Fresh Books Publishing, a literary nonprofit.

Originally from Mexico City, Maité Iracheta is a writer, teacher and translator who’s been weaving threads from New York City’s fabric for over two decades. Some of her work has seen light and ink in Letras Libres, La Tempestad, La Jornada, and other Mexican publications. Among the artists she’s interviewed are Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Spencer Tunick, Andrés Serrano, John Kelly, Elizabeth LeCompte, and Argentine poet Saúl Yurkievich. She’s a graduate from Universidad Iberoamericana and got her Masters in Hispanic American Literature at Columbia University and a Masters in Language Education and Literature at Hunter College. She’s the editor of a bilingual quarterly, addanomadd.com, which was initially launched as a literary platform for no-land nomads. Her play on human rights, Umbilicales, had its debut at Teatro Círculo in the spring of 2022. She teaches language and culture in Spanish, and Mexican literature in English. Through her teaching, she’s received grants for research on education in Kenya, Morocco, and with the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico. She’s earned grants to develop creative writing projects in Oxford, Barcelona, Cartagena, Bergen and Oaxaca. She’s currently working on a novel. Maité lives in Brooklyn with her daughters.

SJ Rozan's eighteen novels and eighty-plus short stories have won multiple awards, including the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity, and also the Japanese Maltese Falcon. She's been honored with Life Achievement Awards from both the Private Eye Writers of America and the Short Mystery Fiction Society. Many of her stories have appeared in various "Best Of" collections, and she's edited three anthologies. Born and raised in the Bronx, SJ now lives in lower Manhattan. She's a graduate of Oberlin College and got her Masters in Architecture at SUNY at Buffalo. SJ was a practicing architect in New York City for over twenty years. SJ teaches and lectures widely, including a July workshop in Assisi, Italy. In 2003 she was an invited speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. SJ has been Guest of Honor at Left Coast Crime, Toastmaster at Bouchercon, twice a presenter at the Shanghai Literary Festival, a Master Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and a Writer-in-Residence at the Wisconsin Writer's Association and at Singapore Management University. www.sjrozan.net

Jennifer Shyue is a translator from Spanish and an assistant editor at New Vessel Press. Her work has appeared in New England Review, The Common, and Words Without Borders, among other outlets, and received support from Cornell’s Institute for Comparative Modernities, the Fulbright Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, Princeton University, and the University of Iowa. Her translations include Julia Wong Kcomt’s chapbook Vice-royal-ties (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021) and Augusto Higa Oshiro’s novel The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu (Archipelago Books, 2023). She can be found at shyue.co.

Catherine Martinez Torigian (Moderator), a native of Brooklyn, NY, earned a Ph.D. in Classics at Brown University before turning to fiction and becoming an Authors Guild Ambassador. Winner of the American Philological Association's 2007 National Pre-Collegiate Teaching Award in Latin, she has presented papers and published articles on Greek and Roman tragedy, the poetry of Pindar, Horace, and Theocritus, and the war commentaries of Julius Caesar. Her fiction has appeared in Bellowing Ark and Digging Through the Fat.

This event is supported by The Writing Life. Writing Life events in 2023 are generously underwritten by Jenny Lawrence.