On September 28th, KSW Presents “All This Wreckage, In Your Own Language,” a reading featuring two debut novelists—Elaine Castillo, author of America Is Not the Heart, and Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree. The reading will be followed by a Q&A with Tayo Literary Magazine co-founder, Melissa Sipin.

The title of this event brings together quotes from both books as their stories begin—when a letter arrives in Fruit of the Drunken Tree, “bringing with it all this wreckage to our doorstep,” and in America Is Not the Heart, when “you can’t remember the last time someone told you to take care of yourself in your own language.”

This is a reading that gives language to the stories and wreckages of war and violence, colonialism and dictatorship, immigration and refuge, family, desperation, and the decisions one makes towards a kind of survival.