Arts & Letters: Author David Martinez
Schedule
Wed May 01 2024 at 06:00 pm
Location
75080 Frank Sinatra Dr, Palm Desert, CA, United States, California 92211 | Palm Desert, CA
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Join us for an evening with David Martinez, who will be in conversation with Tod Goldberg about his debut memoir. BONES WORTH BREAKING is a portrait of the unbreakable bond between brothers and a reckoning with the global forces that shaped them. A book signing will follow.About BONES WORTH BREAKING: Nobody around David Martinez saw how quickly he was breaking apart except for his younger brother, Mike. They stood out in Idaho: mixed-race in a Mormon community that, in the years before David’s birth, considered Black people ineligible for salvation. The Martinez brothers were raised to be “good boys,” definitely not to get high, skateboard all night, or get arrested, all of which they did with zeal. Then their paths diverged. David went on a two-year mission trip to Brazil like his father before him, and Mike stayed in the States, finding himself in and out of prison. When David returned, in the middle of the still-unnamed opioid epidemic, things had irrevocably changed, and in 2021, Mike unexpectedly died in prison.
Martinez writes with a serrated edge, as viscerally felt as an exposed nerve, and transforms from a stoic boy constantly seeking escape to a vulnerable man eager to contextualize the legacies and losses that have shaped his life. With a wild, ragged velocity—flipping and soaring like a pro skater—Martinez defies a linear telling of his life and tackles topics from abuse and racism to writing and capturing the meaning of the specific nostalgia of saudade.
Bones Worth Breaking is a portrait of the unbreakable bond between brothers who were robbed of the chance to grow old together, and a reckoning with the brutal global forces that let so many poor young men of color fall perilously through the cracks.
About David Martinez: David Martinez earned his MFA from UC Riverside Palm Desert and previously taught English and creative writing at Glendale Community College in Arizona. He is a dual citizen of the United States and Brazil and has lived all over both countries as well as in Puerto Rico. His work has appeared in The Coachella Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Broken Pencil, and Automata Review. He lives in Glendale, Arizona. Bones Worth Breaking is his first book.
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Where is it happening?
75080 Frank Sinatra Dr, Palm Desert, CA, United States, California 92211Event Location & Nearby Stays:
