HOLA

My name is Christopher Rey Pérez. I was born on September 7th or 9th in the year 1987 and raised along these coordinates, 26 11'6"N 98 7'4"W, which make up part of the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, a region a few miles from the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.

I am a poet working from within a matrix of opaque folklore, violence, and language in an attempt to incorporate the liminality of a type of "border thinking" I have experienced and witnessed throughout my life. After having had the opportunity to live, work, and write in Mexico, the Occupied West Bank of Palestine, and other countries, my writing has evolved to include the investigation and address of borders as a subject-constituting condition rooted in the coloniality of global exchange.

Some of my writing that's representative of these concerns includes a small chapbook with a few drawings that I published with 98Editions of Beirut in 2012, a 2015 chapbook of writings and photographs I published with LIKE Editorial of Mexico City, a 2016 artist book in collaboration with the artist Barbara Ess that was released for the occasion of an exhibition at 321 Gallery in Brooklyn, a book that composes a book collection from Nicosia, Cyprus, an electronic publication on border theatrics published in Canada, a risograph-printed story that is also translated to Portuguese, a field journal in Spanish from an artist fellowship in Puerto Rico, and a book I edited on aliens. My first "full-length" book was published on March 15, 2017. Titled gauguin's notebook, it writes through Gauguin's Tahitian journal as a way of investigating current-day affective structures along the border vis-a-vis Gauguin's colonialist production in Tahiti.

Collaboration plays a large part in how I choose to shape my writing community, and this has led me to create a small publication of art and literature of the Americas, called Dolce Stil Criollo, that I co-edit with my friend, Gabriel Finotti. Nomadic, multi-lingual, and independent, Dolce Stil Criollo is a project we began in 2013. You can learn more here.

Currently, I work as the program director of the Bard Microcollege at Brooklyn Public Library and as the co-chair in Writing at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

If you would like to know more about me, you could always write me at christopherreyperez (at) gmail (dot) com.

regeneración

Begun as a practice of reading "The Repercussion of a Lynching" by Ricardo Flores Magón on the 105th anniversary of its publication, regeneración is part unfinished translation interrupted by my limitations of articulating Magón's early-20th century idiosyncratic Spanish, part psychogeographic dérive of Avenida Ricardo Flores Magón in Mexico City interrupted by the France attacks of November 13, 2015, and part diary entry and night-addled sprawl interrupted by my attempt at synthesizing these events within a contemporary moment in time where current political discourse in the U.S. spurred by the 2016 presidential race effaces the past as a way of maintaining the emergency of an ahistorical present.

regeneración composes a book collection of unfinished yet extant writings of nine writers from different places of visual and writerly backgrounds. Erden Kosova, Flavia Malusardi, Iordanis Papadopoulos, Isabel Carvalho, Liv Strand, Maria Petrides, Pascalle Burton, and Peter Eramian also compose the collection.

Titled "A Book of Small Things" and edited by Panayiotis Michael, the book collection is published in Nicosia, Cyprus. Design by Omiros Panayides. 2016.

Images courtesy of Panayiotis Michael.