Grinnell College assistant professor of English and Iowa Writers’ Workshop grad Santiago Jose Sanchez will read from their debut novel, Hombrecito. They will be joined in conversation by novelist Claire Lombardo.

Hombrecito is a queer coming-of-age story about a young immigrant’s complex relationships with his mother and his motherland. “Hombrecito is a gorgeous novel of the in-between, the waiting lull, and the changing mind, that shows Santiago Jose Sanchez to be a brilliant poet of silence, desire, light, and shadow. These sentences left me speechless.”  —Brandon Taylor    “Captures with rare vividness the rapture and terror of childhood, the way self-making and self-destruction can grow so tangled as to be indistinguishable. This is a novel of enormous insight, musicality, and love. Sanchez is a stunning new talent.” —Garth Greenwell

Santiago Jose Sanchez (they/them) is a queer Colombian American writer and artist born in Ibagué, Colombia. Their stories have been featured in McSweeney’s Quarterly, ZYZZYVA, Subtropics, and Joyland. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Yale University, Sanchez teaches at Grinnell College and lives in Iowa, Miami, and New York City.

Claire Lombardo is the author of The Most Fun We Ever Had, which has been optioned for television by Reese Witherspoon, and most recently, Same As It Ever Was. She lives in Iowa City, where she has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Grinnell College and works part-time as a bookseller at Prairie Lights Books.