Events at this location

Inner Moonlight is the monthly poetry series at the Wild Detectives! Curated by poet Logen Cure, the show is the second Wednesday of every month. Meet us in the backyard at 7:30pm on Wednesday October 14th for a live reading with a brief open mic to follow. This month, we are proud to present poet Radu Vancu and translator Sean Cotter!

Radu Vancu is a poet, scholar, professor, and translator who has written nine volumes of poetry, a novel, two children’s novellas, a collection of essays, and scholarly publications. He has received numerous awards for his literary works, and also edits Transilvania magazine and Poesis Internațional. He has translated works by Walt Whitman, John Berryman, and Ezra Pound into Romanian, and is the president of Sibiu’s international poetry festival. He also served as the president of PEN Romania.

Sean Cotter is the translator of many works of Romanian literature, and Professor of Literature and Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. His translation of Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid (Deep Vellum, 2022) was awarded the Dublin Literary Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Romanian Cultural Institute prize for best translation of the year.

This event is sponsored in part by the UT-Dallas Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies.

“Follow your inner moonlight, don’t hide the madness.”

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D-CLAIM is a Dallas-based jazz & literature collective founded by poet/bassist J.D. Debris, backing contemporary poets with hypnotic live-band grooves. Sponsored by Project Poetica at SMU English, D-CLAIM brings together hip-hop tinged jazz with a poetry reading on the third Thursday of every month, highlighting an improvisational confluence of words and music.

Tawanda Mulalu was born in Gaborone, Botswana. His first book, Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die (Princeton University Press, 2022), received the 2023 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry and was listed as a best poetry collection of 2022 by The Boston Globe, The New York Times and The Washington Post. His poems have appeared in Brittle Paper, Lana Turner, Lolwe, The New England Review, The Paris Review, A Public Space and elsewhere. He currently lives in Plano, TX.

D-CLAIM has been praised by the Dallas Observer for possessing a “spark that allows the poetic medium to evolve while also giving jazz new material.” Their sound, featuring the original compositions of bandleader J.D. Debris, combines the lyricism of Gil Scott-Heron, the low-end explorations of Esperanza Spalding, and hypnotic grooves informed by East Coast boom-bap and Brazilian soul.

Musicians
Ste’fon Landers, saxophone
Manny Galindo, piano
Nicholas Rothouse, percussion
Ian Yoo, drums
J.D. Debris, bass

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Join us for the Dallas launch of Once Wild, the debut short story collection by s b del llano. The evening will feature a reading and conversation with writers Susan Ayotte Norman and LaToya Watkins, followed by cake and a book signing.

Once Wild, published by High Frequency Press, is a collection of literary fiction exploring identity, survival, and the universal dimensions of humanity. Moving across cultures and landscapes, these stories examine what it means to endure, transform, and remain connected to the wildness within us.

About the participants

s b del llano was raised among Indigenous peoples and multicultural communities in the mountains, foothills, and jungles of Colombia. He moved to the United States at seventeen to pursue his education, earning a BA in literature in Chicago, a Master of Liberal Arts at Southern Methodist University, and a PhD in Humanities and Writing at the University of Texas at Dallas. A writer, poet, and educator, his fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in The New Guard, Sojourn, Hindsight Journal, and Reunion: The Dallas Review. He lives in Dallas and New York City.

Susan Ayotte Norman is a fiction writer from Dallas and holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas in Narrative Theory and American Literature. She teaches Academic Writing and leads the Hilltop Scholars Program at Southern Methodist University. Her short fiction has appeared in TLR: The Literary Review and the anthology Her Texas: Story, Image, and Song, and has been featured in Short Edition’s international short story vending machines.

LaToya Watkins is the award-winning author of two books. Her short story collection, Holler, Child, was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Reading the West Book Award and the Writers’ League of Texas Book Award in Fiction. Her debut novel, Perish, was published to great acclaim in 2022. Her writing has appeared in A Public Space, The Sun, McSweeney’s, and Kenyon Review, among other publications.

This event is free and open to the public.

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Say It With Your Chest DTX presents Get Schooled! Trivia Night at The Wild Detectives.

Are you smarter than a grade-schooler? Test your knowledge and join us for a night of trivia, raffle prizes, drinks, and more!

Pay what you can. All donations go towards sustaining mutual aid initiatives that support our unhoused neighbors in DFW and beyond.

The Wild Detectives
314 W Eighth St, Dallas, TX 75208

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Join John Bradley and The Wild Detectives Book Club for our 110th selection: You Glow in the Dark by Liliana Colanzi, translated from Spanish by Chris Andrews.

Across seven stories, Colanzi brings together science fiction, horror, and the landscapes of Latin America. Environmental destruction, human ambition, and unsettling visions of the future blur the boundary between the familiar and the strange.

Come ready to share what stayed with you, what surprised you, and where these stories took you. Copies are available in the bookstore and through our online store.

You can also join our Goodreads group to follow the club’s reading selections.

Author photo: Isabel Wagemann.

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