Book Launch: PARTY LINE with Kyle Carrero Lopez

Join us for the book launch of Kyle Carrero Lopez’s electrifying debut collection, PARTY LINE, which centers three interconnected forces: social life, US-Cuba relations, and the lives of Black people in the United States and Cuba. Through familial, satirical, and geopolitical lenses, Party Line considers how countries—and people—wield power over those they have othered. Kyle will be joined by poets Jasmine Sanders and Elisa Gonzalez.
The collection features a series meditating on tensions embedded in party spaces. Carrero Lopez challenges assumptions that these spaces are apolitical or purely escapist, revealing unexpected connections between individuals’ actions and those of the state. His work expands bridges between US and Cuban art by developing an urgent poetics around the material conditions of the US embargo and challenging whitewashed images of Cuban Americans in the US imagination.
Alternating between humor and lyric severity, playfulness and political critique, these poems negotiate contradiction with linguistic dexterity and critical consciousness, proving that political poetry can be both serious and joyously alive.

Kyle Carrero Lopez is the author of , the chapbook winner of the 2020 [PANK] Books Contest, , forthcoming July 2026 from Graywolf, and serves as Editor for the . Born to Cuban parents in northern New Jersey, his work centers power, social life, and Afro-Cuban histories, among other subjects.

He is the cofounder of LEGACY, and his writing has been highlighted in Best New Poets and Best of the Net; round-ups in W Magazine, Current Affairs, and The Atlantic; and episodes of and .

Elisa Gonzalez is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, Grand Tour, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, was named one of the best books of 2023 by The New Yorker. FSG will also bring out her novel, The Awakenings, and a nonfiction book, Strangers on Earth.

Jasmine Sanders is a writer from the south side of Chicago. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, ArtForum, BookForum, and New York magazine.