Join us in celebrating the launch of Rubén Degollado’s Throw, a literary crossover novel set in ‘90s Rio Grande Valley. Rubén will be joined by ire’ne lara silva, Natalia Sylvester, and Gerard Robledo.
Llorona is the only girl Güero has ever loved. A wounded soul, she has adopted the name of a ghost from Mexican folklore. True to her namesake, Llorona cast Güero away with the coldness of the apparition she has become. But Güero—though he would never admit it to his friends—still wants to get back together with her.
Güero spends time with his friends Ángel and Smiley—members of the HCP (Hispanics Causing Panic) gang—roaming the streets of the South Texas border towns they inhabit, trying to forget Llorona even as she seems to appear around every corner.
Over three days Güero’s increasingly violent confrontations with Llorona’s current boyfriend will jeopardize the lives of Ángel and Smiley and the love he hopes to regain.
As events begin to accelerate toward their conclusion—and gang signs are thrown as both threats and claims of identity—the question arises: will Güero throw the HCP sign, or will he throw off that life? Güero’s life will be irrevocably changed by violence and loss, but who will he lose, and will he—somewhere along the way—lose himself?
Rubén Degollado is from the Río Grande Valley. His work has been published in Beloit Fiction Journal, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Image, Relief, and the anthologies Juventud, Fantasmas and Bearing the Mystery. He has been a finalist in American Short Fiction’s annual contest, Glimmer Train’s Family Matters Contest, and Bellingham Review’s Tobias Wolff Award. Throw is his debut novel, and is set in the border towns where he grew up.
ire’ne lara silva (above left) is the author of two poetry collections, furia (Mouthfeel Press, 2010) and Blood Sugar Canto (Saddle Road Press, 2016), which were both finalists for the International Latino Book Award in Poetry, an e-chapbook, Enduring Azucares (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015), as well as a short story collection, flesh to bone (Aunt Lute Books, 2013), which won the Premio Aztlán. She and poet Dan Vera are also the co-editors of Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands (Aunt Lute Books, 2017), a collection of poetry and essays. ire’ne is the recipient of a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award, and the 2008 recipient of the Gloria Anzaldúa Milagro Award. ire’ne is currently working on her first novel, Naci. Her latest collection of poetry, CUICACALLI/House of Song, was published by Saddle Road in April 2019.
Natalia Sylvester (above center) is the author of the novels Chasing the Sun and Everyone Knows You Go Home, which was named a Best Book of 2018 by Real Simple. She studied Creative Writing at the University of Miami and is a faculty member of the low-res MFA program at Regis University in Denver, Colorado. Natalia’s articles have appeared in Latina Magazine, Writer’s Digest, The Austin American-Statesman, and NBCLatino.com. Born in Lima, Peru, she came to the U.S. at age four and spent time in South and Central Florida and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas before her family set roots in Miami. She now lives and works in Austin.
Gerard Robledo (above right) is a Latino social justice poet from San Antonio, Texas. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso, teaches creative writing at San Antonio College, and is the Associate Editor for Voices de la Luna: A Quarterly Poetry & Arts Magazine. His Spanish language poetry translations and poetry have appeared in Voices de la Luna, the Texas Poetry Calendar, Pilgrimage, The Thing Itself, Outrage: A Protest Anthology for Injustice in a post 9/11 World, and The Texas Observer. Robledo is also one of the first sixteen poets to be archived in the San Antonio Poetry Archive at Palo Alto College and is a Macondo Writers’ Workshop Fellow.