Lyn Di Iorio discusses "Palo Monte" in New York, NY
Di Iorio's first novel, OUTSIDE THE BONES, is a spellbinding novel that combines the Afro-Caribbean witchcraft of Palo Monte with a dark, unsolved mystery
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Nov 14, 2011 from 07:00 PM to 09:00 PM |
| Where | The City College of New York, 25 Broadway, New York, NY 10004 |
| Contact Phone | 212-925-6625 |
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Lyn Di Iorio lectures on "Writing Palo Monte," as part of The Center for Worker Education's Trans-Caribbean Reflections: Aesthetic and Cultural Expressions of African Derived Religions (The City College of New York, NY, 10004, 25 Broadway, 7th floor (in front of the bull statue at Wall Street), New York, NY, 10004.) For more information click here.
About the Author:
LYN DI IORIO grew up in Puerto Rico and came to the Mainland to attend Harvard University. She received her master's degree from Stanford University's Creative Writing Program and her
doctorate in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She teaches literature and creative writing at The City College of New York and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of scholarly books on Latino literature; this is her first novel, an excerpt of which won an honorable mention in the 2009 New Millennium Writings Awards Competition.
About Outside the Bones:
Fina is a big girl with a big mouth. She’s the neighborhood bruja, or “spirit worker” as she likes to call herself, casting spells for her neighbors in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She can’t believe it, though, when she puts an accidental fufú—or spell—on Chico, the irresistible trumpet-player who lives upstairs. “With so many scraps of his clothing … sprinkled with blood, gunpowder, sugar, spit, and God knows what else, poor Chico’s body didn’t know if it was being cursed or blessed.”
Chico recovers just as two women from his past turn up: his former beauty-queen lover and an attractive young woman claiming to be his long-dead daughter. Fina is not pleased. So she visits her mentor, Tata Victor Tumba Fuego, Master of Fire. He specializes in Palo Monte, the 
Afro-Caribbean magical art of controlling and manipulating spirits housed in cauldrons. The Ancient One, the oldest spirit working for Victor, wants a blood sacrifice from Fina, something she has managed to avoid. “We ain’t on the island no more, we don’t sacrifice in the mountains of Africa or Cuba; we do it in our apartments.” But she needs help, so she’ll do what it takes. All too soon she finds herself involved with a spirit whose quest for revenge can’t be stopped.
Weaving Afro-Caribbean witchcraft rituals with the sixteen-year-old mystery of a woman’s disappearance, Outside the Bones is an erotically charged ghost story set in both present-day New York and Puerto Rico. Following in the tradition of Anne Rice, Lyn Di Iorio’s brilliant debut novel takes a mesmerizing look at issues of race, class, power and greed.
