For two years, Rey M. Rodríguez drew on interviews with the founders of Proyecto Pastoral in Boyle Heights. What he wanted was to get their work onto the page before the community’s 40th anniversary arrived.
He made it. “Todos Somos Sagrados/All Are Sacred,” his debut poetry collection and a tribute to the women of Proyecto Pastoral, was published by El Martillo Press in May. Rodríguez reads from it Sunday, Aug. 9, at 3 p.m. at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, in conversation with Obed Silva.
Rodríguez is a writer, advocate and attorney from Pasadena. He received his MFA in fiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts in May. He is a graduate of Cornell, Princeton and the UC Berkeley law school, and his poetry has appeared in Huizache, Anger is a Gift and the Altadena Poetry Review.
The collection is bilingual, written in English and Spanish so the poems reach readers in whichever language feels like home. It moves through resilience, communal healing and the slow alchemy by which hardship becomes collective strength.
Silva brings his own history to the conversation. Born in Chihuahua and brought to the United States as a toddler, he was left paralyzed by a gunshot wound during years in the gang lifestyle, later earned a master’s degree in medieval literature, and is now an English professor at East Los Angeles College. His memoir “The Death of My Father the Pope” was published in 2021.
Two Los Angeles-area writers who took long routes to the page, talking about mothers, sanctuary and what gets built when institutions fail. Vroman’s asks attendees to RSVP.
Rey M. Rodríguez discusses and signs “Todos Somos Sagrados/All Are Sacred” on Sunday, Aug. 9, at 3 p.m. Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., in Pasadena. For more information, call (626) 449-5320 or visit vromansbookstore.com. RSVP requested.
