For those of you in South Texas, I’ll be reading next Saturday with novelist Carlos Nicolás Flores at The Phoenix Bookstore, Laredo’s only indie bookshop. I met Carlos via a Writers League of Texas virtual workshop on book marketing; we were like the only two Chicanos in the class. And when I invited other small press writers to email me with questions about handling your own marketing and publicity, he took me up on it. As it turned out, whatever his worries about book marketing, man is a seasoned fucking on-fire novelist with a lifetime of work under his belt teaching and supporting and mentoring young writers. I’m currently reading his Sex as a Political Condition, a satirical commentary on borderlands politics laced with lots of sex comedy (as you might imagine from the title). Carlos warned me that his wife threw the book at his head and called it garbage, but at least so far I’ve enjoyed it!

Carlos and I first started organizing this reading a couple months ago, when it looked like we were coming out of the pandemic. Since then of course that ship has tanked again. Because my toddler is too little to get the shot, what was going to be a fun family weekend down in Laredo meeting up with different folks in addition to the reading has turned into a solo dash down 35 to read followed by a dash back in time to put the baby to bed. But it’s still going to kick ass. So if you’re down that way and you’re double vaxxed and masked—come.