LADY WITHOUT LAND | A Busboys and Poets Books Presentation

Join us to explore a funny, witty debut novel that “tracks a young Latina woman through a labyrinth of familial crises and relationship blunders, via the lens of putative book reviews and cocktail recipes”

"By turns witty, tragic, and wholly subversive, Krystal Anali Vazquez's Lady without Land tracks a young Latina woman through a labyrinth of familial crises and relationship blunders, via the lens of putative book reviews and cocktail recipes. From LA to DC to, finally, New York, readers encounter this narrator's growth as she navigates the socioeconomic ladder, routing herself through government bureaucracies and academic institutions, and with them, a host of (often preventable) wreckage. Through it all, Vazquez exudes a penchant for humor and satire, marking this intelligent tome as, quite simply, a compulsively readable and wildly entertaining debut." –  John James, author of The Milk Hours

LADY WITHOUT LAND is a story told in fragments about a señorita who feels lost in and lost without Los Angeles. She uses classic literature and cocktail recipes to organize and populate bits and pieces of a life: growing up as a Mexican middle-class girl in a predominantly white suburb where neighbors labeled her family the “dirty” Mexicans; being bullied by an older sister on car rides from Los Angeles to Mexico, grappling with a father’s gambling addiction, and, later, his death; journeying on the continuous carousel of lovers the Pacific and Atlantic coasts have to offer. A shaken and stirred abecedarian, a sloppy yet put-together künstlerroman, about charting one’s life path amid cultural pressures and the grip of the ever-present past, the book can be read forwards or backwards and, with any hope, completely out of sequence so that no reader can read this novel the same way twice.

Krystal Anali Vazquez is joining us on the Busboys stage alongside author and poet John James to share more about how this book came to life and how she brought together “coming-of-age stories, authentic Latinx characters, and tasty drink recipes that intrigue and inspire” (Celeste Guzmán Mendoza, author of Beneath the Halo and co-founder of CantoMundo). Copies of the book will be available for purchase during and after the event, and Vazquez will be signing following the program.

This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 5:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of LADY WITHOUT LAND will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please note that this event is in person and will not be livestreamed. 

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Krystal Anali Vazquez is a writer and an attorney from Los Angeles living in Brooklyn. Her work navigates the roads in the México lindo of her family's past and present with those above the border. She holds degrees from Loyola Marymount University, Georgetown, and Columbia Law School. At Georgetown, she was a fellow in the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. As part of her legal practice, she is a member of her firm's team that defends the legality of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Lady without Land, winner of the 2023 George Garrett Fiction Prize, selected by Manuel Muñoz, is her first novel.

John James is the author of The Milk Hours (Milkweed, 2019), selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, as well as three chapbooks, most recently Extinction Song (Tupelo, 2026), winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Award. His poems appear in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, Best American Poetry, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. His work has beens supported by fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, the Academy of American Poets, and the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. He holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia and is completing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Host or Publisher Busboys and Poets