Virtual Event
heidi restrepo rhodes: Ampersand Organ
The Literary Arts Bookstore & Cafe is pleased to welcome author heidi restrepo rhodes to celebrate her debut short story collection, Ampersand Organ.
About the book:
A fearless, expansive collection that blurs the boundary between body and poem, wielding a liberatory lyric impulse that revels from neuron to nebula and back.
Here is a book of many hearts, a revolutionary tide pool, a mycelial space and sensorium where our neural pathways are “always shared, collective, and entangled.” In this “more-than-human lyric,” heidi andrea restrepo rhodes offers the ampersand, a mode of encounter that unfixes the reader. This form—a lyric prose poem beginning, midsentence, with an ampersand—accesses the intimacies of a life shaped by perpetual “and-ing.” These ampersands move by associative leap, synesthetic braid, and inter-species blur to revel in everything that makes us more than singular subjects.
heidi restrepo rhodes
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a writer, artist, scholar, educator, cultural worker, and creature of the Colombian diaspora. They are author of The Inheritance of Haunting, Ephemeral, Afterlives of Discovery: Speculative Geographies in the Settler Colonial Imaginary, and Wayward Creatures. They are a professor of feminist, queer, and disability studies; poetry coeditor at Apogee Journal; and editor/curator of the Anomalous Press column Wild-Wired: Neuroqueer and Neurodivergent Poetics. A Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation alum and recipient of the 2023 Creative Capital Award, they have received poetry fellowships from Zoeglossia, CantoMundo, Radar Productions, and the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. Their poetry and creative nonfiction have been published in The American Poetry Review, The Normal School, Michigan Quarterly Review, Alocasia, Poetry, and Waxwing, among other places. They live in unceded Acjachemen and Tongva lands, otherwise known as Southern California.
