Word Up at Alianza Dominicana Cultural Center: Alejandro Heredia’s LOCA with Elizabeth Acevedo

Thursday, March 6, 2025 – 7:00pm to 8:30pm Alianza Dominicana Cultural Center 530 W 166th St New York , NY 10032 Word Up Community Bookshop and Dominican Writers Association invite you to celebrate the debut release of Loca by Alejandro Heredia . In conversation with Heredia will be award-winning author Elizabeth Acevedo . There will be a limited signing after the event. “In a novel that is as tender as it is brilliant, Heredia writes with ferocity and warmth.”—Elizabeth Acevedo This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket. Alianza Dominican Cultural Center is located at 530 West 166th Street New York, NY 10032. The event will take place on the second floor, which is accessible by an elevator. ABOUT THE BOOK If Junot Diaz’s critically acclaimed collection Drown and Janet Mock’s Emmy-winning series Pose produced offspring, Alejandro Heredia’s Loca would be their firstborn. It’s 1999, and best friends Sal and Charo are striving to hold on to their dreams in a New York determined to grind them down. Sal is a book-loving science nerd trying to grow beyond his dead-end job in a new city, but he’s held back by tragic memories from his past in Santo Domingo. Free-spirited Charo is surprised to find herself a mother at twenty-five, partnered with a controlling man, working at the same supermarket for years, her world shrunk to the very domesticity she thought she’d escaped in her old country. When Sal finds love at a gay club one night, both his and Charo’s worlds unexpectedly open up to a vibrant social circle that pushes them to reckon with what they owe to their own selves, pasts, futures, and, always, each other. Loca follows one daring year in the lives of young people living at the edge of their own patience and desires. With expansive grace, it reveals both the grueling conditions that force people to migrate and the possibility of friendship as home when family, nations, and identity groups fall short. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Alejandro Heredia is a writer from the Bronx. He has received fellowships from LAMBDA Literary, Dominican Studies Institute, UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in fiction from Hunter College. Loca is his debut novel. ABOUT THE MODERATOR Elizabeth Acevedo is the current Young People’s Poet Laureate and the New York Times-bestselling author of The Poet X, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Pura Belpré Award, the Carnegie medal, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and the Walter Award. She is also the author of With the Fire on High—which was named a best book of the year by the New York Public Library, NPR, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal—and Clap When You Land, which was a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor book and a Kirkus finalist. She holds a BA in Performing Arts from The George Washington University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. Acevedo has been a fellow of Cave Canem, Cantomundo, and a participant in the Callaloo Writer’s Workshops. She is a National Poetry Slam Champion, and resides in Washington, DC with her loves.