CAFÉ CULTURA
A flyer from Café Cultura, the long-standing and very popular series of spoken word performances. This event is set for April 11 at the Inner City Parish, 9th and Galapago, Denver. Café Cultura Open Mic happens the second Friday of every month. More info: [email protected]; 720-436-1830.
LATINO PULITZERS
Junot Díaz, a 39-year-old native of the Dominican Republic who moved to New Jersey as a boy, won the Pulitzer prize for fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead, 2007)
The novel, which also won the National Book Critics Award, revolves about Oscar, an obese comics fan growing up in Paterson, N.J., and his dysfunctional Dominican family, going back to the Rafael Trujillo dictatorship.
Read more here ...
Prior to Díaz, the only U.S. Latino writer to ever receive the Pulitzer Prize in literature was Oscar Hijuelos, for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, (Farrar, Straus, 1989).
Michael Ramirez won in the editorial cartooning category. Ramirez is a senior editor and the editorial cartoonist for Investor's Business Daily's editorial page, Issues & Insights. He has won several awards during his career, including a previous Pulitzer in 1994, the UCI Medal from the University of California, Irvine and the Sigma Delta Chi Awards in 1995 and 1997. He has been the editorial cartoonist of the Los Angeles Times, the Commercial Appeal and USA Today, and is nationally syndicated in over 450 newspapers around the world.
DÍA DE LOS NIÑOS April 27, Noon – 4:00 pm
Free general admission to the
Denver Art Museum, Denver Public Library, Colorado History Museum and
Byers-Evans House Museum. Enjoy hands-on art activities, storytelling, and live dance and music performances throughout the day. Introduced in Mexico in 1924, Día de los Niños is now celebrated in more than 120 countries as a way to recognize the important role of children in the community and to promote a sense of understanding among young people of all nations.
720-913-0169
MANIFEST DESTINIESDr. Laura E. Gómez will sign and read at the
Denver Book Mall, 32 Broadway (between 1st and Ellsworth Avenues) at 3:00 on Sunday, April 27, 2008. She will discuss
Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (NYU Press, 2007). The book traces origins of Mexican Americans as a racial group in the U.S. The title of her presentation is
Shifting Meanings of Race and Law. The book focuses on the experience of “the first Mexican Americans” -- the 115,000 Mexicans who became American citizens by virtue of the peace treaty that ended the U.S. war with Mexico in 1848. This event is a presentation by
Who Else! Books, one of the shops in the Denver Book Mall.
BEYOND CHICANISMO
Another flyer, this one from
Beyond Chicanismo, announcing an event scheduled for April 15 at the Tivoli, on the Auraria Campus, Denver.
Later.
I mentioned before that I had an opportunity to create some interesting appendix-type materials to put at the end of The Sky Village. There are several items included. Most are in English, but one is written in symbols from the Kaimira Code, which is a fantasy language created for the book series.
The other non-English piece is in Chinese. Half of the story is set in China (or more accurately, in the skies over China). The sky villagers are information traders, and they get their news via notes carried by pigeons. It’s called cloudwatching, and the person assigned to gather, interpret, and share the news is the Cloudwatcher.
I thought it would be fun to show a few of these notes, and even more fun to show them in Chinese.
My Chinese writing is very poor, much worse than my spoken Chinese, so I conscripted my wife to do the hand lettering, using special paper and a fancy pen I borrowed from my office.
She started off doing Chinese cursive, which looks pretty messy (as cursives tend to look), then tried the more careful lettering learned during grammar school, which did the trick.
I let it dry then shipped it off to the publisher, where it was sprinkled with magical publisher pixie dust and whatever else Candlewick does to make such pretty books.
“Big barbed warhammer and plate armor can only mean one thing.”
“What.”
“Rock and roll!”
“heheeee….”
“Yay, a quiz! I love quizzes!”
“Okay, the rules are pretty simple. We’re going to put up five questions, and if you want to answer, you just add a comment on this article. We’ll put up the answers on Monday of next week, so you’ve got the weekend to study.”
“All the answers are in our books, so if you read up and you’re a good studier like me, you’ll know the answers!”
“Okay, Alanna-sama asks the first question.”
“Question Number One: What kind of flowers grow alongside the walkway in front of Jessica’s house?”
“Ooh, good question.”
“Cici gots the second question.”
“Yeah! Okay Question Number Two: Where was I when I first found the Chronicler’s Lantern and what was nearby?”
“Talitha-chan gets question number three.”
“Question Number Three: What is the room number of the Tree Shores High School Band Room?”
“Ranko-chan gets question number four.”
“Question Number Four: What treasure did we get from the big demon monsters in Palace in the Sky?”
“And I get Question Number Five: In the Legend of the LadyStar, where did the battle against the Vulture Crest take place?”
“There you go folks. If you get all five right, you’re a certified LadyStar champ! Don’t forget to vote!”
“Okay boys and girls, it’s voting time again. Professor Planet over here has installed a new poll and this one should be interesting. Right over there on the left side of every page: crimson background, nice, gold lettering, nice. Buttons for each answer and a button to vote.”
“Ooh, there’s seven answers. Let’s see, there’s a message board, and a shoutbox, and more blog comments.”
“What’s a shout box?”
“That’s a little window where anyone can type a short message any time they want. It’s really simple and fast.”
“We should bring back the Character Book. That thing rocked. We had like 500 signatures or something.”
“Most of these are pretty easy to do.”
“I think our audience will make a wise decision.”
“It’s up to you guys. Tell us what you think!”
“Yeah! Jump in there and VOTE! We be out!”
“Okay, Hayashi and me fixed the Call of the Huntress page, and we got all of the links linked and the pages where they’re supposed to be.”
“Goody, ’cause I wanna read more about Shannon-sama and her big magical kitty cat named Kishi. There’s six previews now, huh?”
“Yes, and they’re all linked from the Call of the Huntress Preview Page. The four-part Plot Against the Vicereine Story is linked together as well, so you can read all four parts in sequence.”
“Sweet.”
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Michael Ramirez represent an element of the extreme Right in this country?
If so, why are we giving him attention in La Bloga?
If I'm wrong, I apologize to Mr. Ramirez.
Concerned Chicano
perhaps because this is an open forum. let's not extend the discrimination we face in gringolandia to our own.
Una Latina