Chicago poet and professor Diego Baez debuts YAGUARETE WHITE

Chicago poet and professor Diego Baez debuts YAGUARETE WHITE

On February 20, 2024, acclaimed Chicago poet Diego Báez launches his debut collection, University of Arizona Press introduces Yaguareté White (University of Arizona Press), in which English, Spanish, and Guaraní encounter each other with humor and insight through the elusive yet potent figure of the jaguar. We’d love for you to feature Diego and his debut in conjunction with its launch.

Diego Báez is a finalist for the Georgia Poetry Prize and a semifinalist for the Berkshire Prize for Poetry. A fellow at CantoMundo, the Surge Institute, and the Poetry Foundation’s Incubator for Community-Engaged Poets, Báez has served on the boards of the National Book Critics Circle, the International David Foster Wallace Society, and Families Together Co-operative Nursery School. His poems, book reviews, and essays have appeared in several online and print publications. A native of Bloomington/Normal, Illinois, he lives in Chicago with his wife and daughter and teaches at the City Colleges.

He's celebrating locally with three events:
February 22 at 7pm: Harry S. Truman College Theater, 4310 N. Racine Ave. (reading)

February 29 at 6:00 pm: Independence Branch Library (meeting room), 4024 N. Elston Ave. (reading)

March 28 at 7:00 pm: Women & Children First Bookstore, 5233 N. Clark St. (in conversation with author and Booklist Senior Editor Donna Seaman)
All events are free and open to the public.

The son of a Paraguayan father and a mother from Pennsylvania, Baéz grew up in central Illinois as one of the only brown kids on the block—but that didn’t keep him from feeling like a gringo on family visits to Paraguay. Exploring this contradiction as it weaves through experiences of language, self, and place, Baéz revels in showing up the absurdities of empire and chafes at the limits of patrimony, but he always reserves his most trenchant irony for the gaze he turns on himself.

Notably, this raucous collection also wrestles with Guaraní, a state-recognized Indigenous language widely spoken in Paraguay. Guaraní both structures and punctures the book, surfacing in a sequence of jokes that double as poems, and introducing but leaving unresolved ambient questions about local histories of militarism, masculine bravado, and the outlook of the campos. Cutting across borders of every kind, Baéz’s poems attempt to reconcile the incomplete, contradictory, and inconsistent experiences of a speaking self that resides between languages, nations, and generations.

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