In Their Own Words: A Reading

Amanda Yates Garcia is a writer, artist, professional witch, and the Oracle of Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in The Millions, The LA Times, Time Out, LA Weekly, GOOP, Glamour, The London Times, CNN, Salon, as well as a viral appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight. She has led classes and workshops on magic and witchcraft at many institutions and venues including UCLA, UC Irvine, MOCA Los Angeles, The Hammer Museum, LACMA, and The Getty. She is also the co-host of the popular Strange Magic podcast. Initiated (Grand Central Publishing), Amanda Yates Garcia’s debut as author, is both a memoir and a manifesto. An initiation signals a beginning: a door opens and you step through. Traditional Wiccan initiates are usually brought into the craft through a ceremony with a High Priestess. But while her mother, a practicing witch herself, initiated her into the earth-centered practice of witchcraft when she was 13 years old, but Yates Garcia 's real life as a witch only began after undergoing a series of spontaneous initiations of her own. Initiated describes her journey, the descent into the underworlds of poverty, sex work, and misogyny before returning to her body, harnessing her power, and creating the magical world she longed for through witchcraft. Peppered with mythology, tales of the goddesses and magical women throughout history, Initiated stands squarely at the intersection of witchcraft and feminism. Author Francesca Lia Block found in it "Mythic journeys to the underworld, goddesses, ecstasies, fairy tales, ghosts, love, sex, female empowerment, challenging the patriarchy: Initiated is full of my favorite things, told with savage grace [ …]. This book will change your life.”

Jaquira Díaz is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the Kenyon Review, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the MacDowell Colony, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a visiting assistant professor in the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work appears in Rolling Stone, the Guardian, the Fader, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Best American Essays, and other publications. Author Julia Alvarez writes of her debut memoir, “There is more life packed on each page of Ordinary Girls (Algonquin Books) than some lives hold in a lifetime.” Ordinary Girls is a fierce, beautiful, and unflinching memoir from a wildly talented debut author. While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Jaquira Díaz found herself caught between extremes: as her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was surrounded by the love of her friends; as she longed for a family and home, she found instead a life upended by violence. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico’s history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism. Díaz triumphantly maps a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be.

T Kira Madden is an APIA writer, photographer, and amateur magician. She is the founding editor-in-chief of No Tokens, and facilitates writing workshops for homeless and formerly incarcerated individuals. A 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction literature, she has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Tin House, DISQUIET, Summer Literary Seminars, and Yaddo, where she was selected for the 2017 Linda Collins Endowed Residency Award. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Her debut memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls (Bloomsbury Publishing)  is a raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hiding in plain sight. Lauren Groff calls it, “Frank and funny and powerful and surprising. An utterly gorgeous debut.” With unflinching honesty and lyrical prose, spanning from 1960s Hawai'i to the present-day struggle of a young woman mourning the loss of a father while unearthing truths that reframe her reality, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is equal parts eulogy and love letter. It's a story about trauma and forgiveness, about families of blood and affinity, both lost and found, unmade and rebuilt, crooked and beautiful.