Something toothy is coming to Medicina. Join translators Dora Prieto and Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier, with special guests Román Luján and Hugo García Manríquez, for an evening of poetry with bite, celebrating Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza’s JAWS [tiburón], translation out now from Cardboard House Press (2026).
What happens when the shark gets tired of being the villain? When it splits into a chorus of workers who have bills to pay? When jaws starts sounding suspiciously like yo? Moving between ocean and office, Hollywood horror and everyday survival, this darkly comic collection sinks its dientes into work, language, and the business of staying alive.
Come for poems, stay until your teeth get pointy and a fin cuts the moon in two.
DORA PRIETO is a Mexican and Canadian poet and translator whose life and work have an unruly relationship to geography. She is a 2025–27 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and has held residencies at Hedgebrook and the Banff Centre. She is the co-translator of JAWS [tiburón] by Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza (Cardboard House Press, 2026). Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2025, Catapult, and Maisonneuve, and she won the 2025 Bronwen Wallace Award for poetry. She is a co-founder of El Mashup Collective, and her practice moves across poetry, translation, textiles, and visual forms.
Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier
Born in Cuernavaca, Mexico ✿ city of eternal Spring ✿ and raised in el Distrito Federal, Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier writes and translates from unceded Coast Salish territories (Vancouver, BC). Her work has appeared in PRISM International, Volume, Discorder and carte blanche. She is part of eclectic artist collectives mim and El Mashup, Festival Coordinator and programmer at the Vancouver Latin American Film Fest, and co-host of Vivaporú on CiTR 101.9FM. Foodie who shelves books and binds them too. Ocean child. She has felt the presence of a shark stirring nearby waters. Dani has two feisty gorgeous dachshunds, Xoco and Rol. @la.tacodelic
Román Luján is a Mexican poet, scholar, and literary translator based
in the Bay Area. He is the author of several poetry books in Spanish,
including Sánafabich, where he explores a poetics of anti-assimilation
by examining the history of violence (material and symbolic) on both
sides of the US-Mexico border. His work, translated into English,
German, and Finnish, has been awarded three national poetry prizes in
Mexico. Imagenigma, his first full poetry collection translated into
English, will be published by Cardboard House Press. He teaches in the
Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley.
Hugo García Manríquez,. Two of Hugo's most recent translations into Spanish are two
anthologies he edited and translated. One of the San Francisco Bay
poet Jack Spicer, “After Lorca and other poems” and the other by
English poet Sean Bonney, titled “The Language of barricades”. His
latest poetry collection is Lo común, translated and published by
Cardboard House Press as Commonplace.
Dora @primadora_
Dani @la.tacodelic
Xitlalitl @pollitaconpapos
Cardboard House Press @cardboardhousepress