Author Talk: How to Look Away with Daniel Peña and Sasha Vasilyuk

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Photo courtesy of the author

In How to Look Away, Daniel Peña explores how fringe elements of his Texas childhood—AM radio, conspiracy theories, Post-Cold War paranoia—came to dominate the American political discourse and contributed to our extreme tolerance of human rights abuses against migrants from Latin America and elsewhere. He asks: What compels us to look away from these abuses? And how do we wake ourselves into action?

These evocative essays braid journalism, cultural criticism, and memoir, roaming from the vestigial Comanche War battlefields of his native Austin, to the black markets of Mexico City, to the home of a cartel hitman’s family doomed to live in the unglamorous aftermath of his crimes. Writing from both Mexico and the United States, Daniel Peña reflects on two childhood fears: demons and the death penalty. Or the answer to the question, “Do you ever really belong to yourself?” A question that serves as the looking glass through which Peña meditates on American citizenship and the kinds of people we are willing to disappear in the name of the American project.

Daniel Peña is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer and Associate Professor at the University of North Texas where he teaches in the PhD Program in Creative Writing.  Formerly, he was based out of the UNAM in Mexico City where he worked as Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar. A graduate of Cornell University and a former Picador Guest Professor in Leipzig, Germany, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, The Rumpus, the Kenyon Review, Texas Monthly, NBC News, and The New York Times Magazine among other venues. He’s currently a regular contributor to the Guardian and the Ploughshares blog. His novel, Bang, is out now from Arte Publico Press. He lives in the beautiful Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Sasha Vasilyuk is a journalist and author of a debut novel, Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury), winner of the California Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. It has been translated into seven languages. Her nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, CNN, Harper’s Bazaar, Time, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Telegraph, KQED, and elsewhere. Sasha grew up between Ukraine and Russia before immigrating to the U.S. at the age of 13. She lives in San Francisco.

Our bookseller for this event will be the Friends of the Mill Valley Library Bookstore.

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