The Center for Literary Arts is pleased to present authors Jaime Cortez and Dino Enrique Piacentini in a reading and conversation from their literary debuts. This event takes place on Thursday, November 7, 2024 at Hammer Theatre at 6:30 PM.​​

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Invasion of the Daffodils by Dino Enrique Piacentini is a novel set the Korean War, on a small island off the coast of California. We are introduced to eleven-year-old Chico Flores as he scavenges a mysterious crate of daffodil bulbs that have washed ashore at Sucker’s Cove. Chico is delighted, knowing that he can sell the bulbs and make much-needed money to support his family. But these bulbs are different, alien even. They seem to click and hiss and have minds of their own, and when planted, they send up their shoots unnaturally fast, swamping gardens, cracking through pavement, splitting the foundations of buildings. Very soon, the Island is facing a full-scale invasion, and as Chico and his family find themselves in the crosshairs of an irate community, the Islanders' long-standing rifts around race, class, and sexuality explode into the open. A lyrical novel about family, “invasion,” and heroism, Invasion of the Daffodils rifles through the tumult of love and the rubble of loss to examine the problems, possibilities, and inevitability of unexpected change.

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Dino Enrique Piacentini grew up in Los Angeles, lived in San Francisco for twenty years, and has also, at various times, set down stakes in Houston, Oaxaca, Champaign, and Prague. His writing has been published in Gulf Coast, Confrontation, Pembroke, The Globe & Mail, The Atticus Review, and The Massachusetts Review, among other places, and his debut novel, Invasion of the Daffodils, about a Mexican-American family living on an island off the coast of California during the Korean War, will be published by Astrophil Press in 2024. He was a collaborating writer for the Aura Contemporary Ensemble’s Words and Music concert and served as Fiction Editor at Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. He has taught creative writing at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the University of Houston; the Boldface Emerging Writers Conference; and Inprint Houston. Before becoming a writer, he worked as an arts administrator at The Mexican Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Asian Art Museum, and Galería de la Raza. Currently, he lives in Denver, where he teaches creative writing at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and the University of Denver.

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This event is made possible thanks to the support of the Martha Heasley Cox Lecture and the College of Humanities and the Arts Artistic Excellence Programming Grants.