Brown Neon Book Launch

Celebrate the launch of Brown Neon, Tucson author Raquel Gutiérrez’s debut essay collection! Brown Neon is a meditation on southwestern terrains, intergenerational queer dynamics, and surveilled brown artists that crosses physical and conceptual borders. The event will feature readings by Raquel, special guests Natalie Lima and Kid Congo Powers, and beer by Barrio Brewing.

This program is free.

Books will be available for purchase at MOCA courtesy of Antigone Books.

Raquel Gutiérrez is an arts critic, writer, poet, and educator. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Gutiérrez credits the queer and feminist diy, post-punk zine culture of the 1990s, plus Los Angeles County and Getty paid arts internships, for introducing her/them to the various vibrant art and music scenes and communities throughout Southern California. Gutiérrez is a 2021 recipient of the Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism and a 2017 recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She is/They are faculty for Oregon State University–Cascades’ Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing. Gutiérrez calls Tucson, Arizona, home.

Natalie Lima is a Cuban-Puerto Rican writer and a graduate of the MFA program in creative nonfiction writing at the University of Arizona. Her essays and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Longreads, Guernica, Brevity, The Offing, Catapult, Sex and the Single Woman (Harper Perennial, 2022), Body Language (Catapult, 2022), and elsewhere. Lima’s writing has been honored in Best Small Fictions (2020), and noted twice in Best American Essays (2019 and 2020). In the fall, Lima will join the creative writing faculty at Butler University as Assistant Professor in the Department of English. Find Natalie on Twitter @natalielima09.

Kid Congo Powers has been described as a “legendary guitarist and paragon of cool” with “the greatest resume ever of anyone in rock music.” – Mark Lanegan. That unique imprint on rock history stems from being a member of not one but three beloved, groundbreaking, and influential groups—Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the Cramps, and last but not least, The Gun Club, the wildly inventive punk-blues band he co-founded. Kid has written a memoir titled “Some New Kind of Kick” (Hachette Books out 10/18/2022) that is “an intimate, coming-of-age memoir by legendary guitarist Kid Congo Powers, detailing his experiences as a young, queer Mexican-American in 1970s Los Angeles through his rise in the glam rock and punk rock scenes.” Kid lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Headshot credit: Thea Q. Tagle