Ep. 129 The Myth of Strength with Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is the author of The Stacks Book Club selection for September, The Undocumented Americans. On today’s episode we get a deeper (and spoiler free) look at the book, and why Karla felt compelled to tell these stories now. We also discuss the audience Karla had in mind while writing, her ideal writing set up, and why describing women of color as “strong” is a form of erasure.

The Stacks Book Club selection for September is The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, we will discuss the book with Lupita Aquino on September 30th.

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Everything we talk about on today’s episode can be found below in the show notes and on Bookshop.org and Amazon.

• The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
• Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling
• Harvard University
• How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez
• The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
• Chris Jackson

• Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Namrata Tripathi
• Eileen Myles
• The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
• American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
• Amadou Diallo (The New York Times)
• “Lana Del Rey and Alison Roman flaunted white women’s privilege. But they’re not alone” (Lorraine Ali, The Los Angeles Times)
• FKA Twigs
• Joan Didion
• Gertrude Stein
• Meg White
• “This Is the Face of an Undocumented Immigrant. Don’t Look Away.” (Caitlin Dickerson, The New York Times)
• Caitlin Dickerson
• “What we’re reading this summer” (The New Yorker)
• Jonathan Blitzer
• Tina Vasquez
• The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
• “The American Dirt Controversy Is Painfully Intramural” (Randy Boyagoda, The Atlantic)
• Charlize Theron
• The Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001)
• Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
• The White Album by Joan Didion
• A Small Place by Jamaica Kingcaid
• The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
• Inferno by Eileen Myles
• Kendrick Lamar
• The White Stripes
• Homecoming (Beyonce, 2019)
• “I’m Real” Jennifer Lopez Ft. Ja Rule
• The Strokes
• Bella Hadid
• Vladimir Nabokov
• Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
• Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang
• They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell
• J. D. Salinger

Connect with Karla: Instagram
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