Writer's Reading: Frederick Luis Aldama

Hear Ohio State professor Frederick Luis Aldama read from his first book of fiction, Long Stories Cut Short: Fictions from the Borderlands. A book signing follows the reading.

About the author:

Frederick Luis Aldama is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English and University Distinguished Scholar at Ohio State. He is founder and director of LASER, a mentoring and research hub for Latinos (9th grade through college), which was selected as a 2015 Bright Spot in Hispanic Education by the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics. An expert on Latino popular culture, Aldama is the author, co-author, and editor of twenty-six books, including Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez and The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez.

About Long Stories Cut Short

Xbox videogamer cholo cyberpunks. Infants who read before they talk. Vatos locos, romancing abuelos, border crossers and border smugglers, drug kingpins, Latina motorbike riders, philosophically musing tweens, and so much more.

The stories in this dynamic bilingual prose-art collection touch on the universals of romance, family, migration and expulsion, and everyday life in all its zany configurations. Each glimpse into lives at every stage—from newborns and children to teens, young adults, and the elderly—further submerges readers in psychological ups and downs. In a world filled with racism, police brutality, poverty, and tensions between haves and have-nots, these flashes of fictional insight bring gleaming clarity to life lived where all sorts of borders meet and shift.

Frederick Luis Aldama and graphic artists from Mapache Studios give shape to ugly truths in the most honest way, creating new perceptions, thoughts, and feelings about life in the borderlands of the Américas. Each bilingual prose-art fictional snapshot offers an unsentimentally complex glimpse into what it means to exist at the margins of society today. These unflinching and often brutal fictions crisscross spiritual, emotional, and physical borders as they give voice to all those whom society chooses not to see.
—The University of Arizona Press press release