Tag: Raquel I. Penzo

Alum Fun Update: Raquel I. Penzo’s Péinate

In a time when women’s voices need to be shouted and not silenced, we are proud to recommend:

Péinate: Hair Battles Between Latina Mothers & Daughters includes stories, poems and essays about fights, acceptance, insecurities, and identity, and how it shapes the mother-daughter bond in Latinx households. Little girls longing to be accepted, and considered beautiful, by their moms; and mothers who, guided by fear or stress or not knowing better, who just want the world to accept their daughters. The pieces in this anthology get to heart of the stories most Latinas know too well.

Congratulations to friend and alum Raquel I. Penzo for bringing this fabulous anthology into the world! Click here to get your copy today.

But that’s not all. This weekend you can get a jump on Halloween with this spookalicious Brooklyn Lit Crawl event presented by La Pluma y La Tinta. Saturday, October 6th at 6 pm. Click here for more info and to RSVP.

El Cuco & Other Scary Stories

Orlando Ferrand, Mariana Goycoechea, and Alexis Francisco share tales from their childhood about El Cuco (the boogie man), and what he looked like in Cuba, Guatemala, and Mexico, according to the scary stories their moms told.

Episode 12 – Fiction Edition

Our own Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons was interviewed about how our series might help a fiction writer. Read the interview on About.com here. Then give a listen to our special “Fiction Edition” show to hear firsthand how No, YOU Tell It! works across genres.

These stories were recorded live on June 17th at Jimmy’s No. 43 and feature two alums who came back to kick-off the summer by switching-up fun, frightening, and for the first-time ever FICTION stories.

We opened up our special show with an unsettling tale written by Jim Cairl that may keep you up at night wondering if, and more importantly, WHEN you will wake up. Read here by Raquel I. Penzo is “The Sleeping Season” written by Jim Cairl and directed by Erika Iverson.

Fiction edition

Switching it up, a young girl confronts spending what’s left of her youth behind bars due to a violent act. But, by focusing on the recipe for her Nana’s farina, she brings a bit of comfort to her prison sentence.

Jim Cairl performs “Breakfast with Nana in the Small Visitor’s Room” written by Raquel I. Penzo and directed by Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons.

Bios:

Jim Cairl is an actor, writer, and does a mean karaoke of It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine). Some of the more recent shows he’s appeared in are Richard III, Death of a Salesman, Flowers of Uptown and Himmelreich. Jim also penned a (very) short film that will be shot in July. Jim won on the television quiz show Jeopardy!, which is a story that he will tell to anyone who listens until the day he dies. Lastly, he’d like to thank Madeline, Ava, and Finn (his three lovely children) and Victoria (his very patient wife) for putting up with his odd schedules and needing to be alone in a quiet room for a while.

Raquel I. Penzo is a Brooklyn, NY, native of Dominican descent who has carved a career for herself as a writer, editor, and literary event curator. She hosts the New Voices Reading Series each quarter in NYC and works as a copywriter at Brooklyn Public Library. Raquel authored the self-published My Ego Likes the Compliments…And Other Musings on Writing, and the short stories, “Grey Matter” (Blue Lake Review), “Perspective on a Murder” (Mason’s Road), “On a Blue Day” (You Should Be Here), and “Enfermos” (Rose Red Review). An anthology of works from participants of her reading series was released on April 2014. Visit Raquel online at RaquelPenzo.com.