9900 Culver Blvd
Culver City
CA 90232
Angeleno Rodrigo Ribera d’Ebre is the author of the novel “The Displaced” (Arte Publico Press, June 30) which is set on LA’s Westside in the 1990’s and is a dystopian coming-of-age novel loosely modeled after The Plague by Albert Camus that explores how gentrification affects the primarily working class Latino neighborhood where the novel is set and that is modeled roughly after the neighborhood where the author grew up at the same time. Junot Diaz has already given the book a great blurb: “What an extraordinary voice … in this utterly thrilling and utterly necessary novel, three battered friends attempt to save their community from a hideous tide of gentrification, but the question that towers over their schemes and furies is: can they save themselves? Ribera d’Ebre has written a scorcher of a debut.”
Obed Silva is the author of “The Death of My Father the Pope,” the critically acclaimed memoir about growing up on both sides of the Mexican border the havoc his father’s battle with alcohol wreaked on his family and affected the author’s own life and experience with addiction and sobriety. The book has received many stellar reviews with David Ulin praising it in the LA Times as “an indelible look at the complicated ways grief, family and addiction can intertwine” and Rigoberto González describing it as “compelling” in The San Francisco Chronicle.
Together the authors will have a conversation about the themes of race, immigration, family, incarceration, and more that intertwine and overlap in their books.
