Carnaval Fever: Book Launch and Conversation with Yuliana Ortiz Ruano and Yaissa Jiménez

Join us on Thursday, November 13 at 7pm to celebrate the launch of Yuliana Ortiz Ruano’s novel Carnaval Fever (Soft Skull Press, 2025). Ortiz Ruano will come together in conversation with poet and writer Yaissa Jiménez.

About Carnaval Fever
Ainhoa lives a protected life within the walls of her grandmother’s house in the neighborhood of Esmeraldas in Ecuador. Surrounded by a gaggle of aunts who love and teach her, Ainhoa narrates moments that evoke the powerful presence of music and dance in her daily life while also confronting familial violence over the course of Carnaval season. Seen through Ainhoa’s innocent eyes, the difficult themes that have defined the South American country’s recent history, including economic hardship, migration, and upheaval, are but one side of an enormous cultural richness steeped in the joy, music, and vibrancy of this singular community of women.

Following the contours of Carnaval, and sublimely translated by Madeleine Arenivar, Yuliana Ortiz Ruano’s sensorial and viscerally alive novel brims with poetry and exuberance, as well as the pain of an existence lived in the forgotten corners of the world. Carnaval Fever is the introduction of an important new voice in Latin American letters, available in English for the first time.

Yuliana Ortiz Ruano is an Afro-Ecuadorian writer, poet, and teacher, as well as a DJ of Afro-Caribbean music. She has published several books of poetry and prose, including the multi award-winning Fiebre de carnaval (Carnaval Fever), which, among other accolades, was chosen as one of the 50 best books of 2022 by El País. She is also the author of the poetry books Sovoz, Canciones del fin del mundo, y Cuaderno del imposible retorno a Pangea, and the book of short stories Litorales. She was selected by the International Writers in Residence program in Granada, Spain in 2023, and was chosen for the Translator Choice II award at the LATINALE Latin America Literature Festival in Berlin. As a curator, she organized the national exhibit Afrofuturisms: Ancestral Technopoetics for the Future and is currently leading a UNESCO-funded project titled Re-escribir la isla, Re-habitar el tránsito, Autohistorias de mujeres afrodescendientes de la Isla Trinitaria [Re-writing the island, Re-inhabiting transit: Auto-histories of Afro-descendent women of the Trinitaria Island].

Yaissa Jiménez is a poet, performer, writer, and screenwriter addicted to observation. Her first book of poetry, Ritual de la papaya, was published in 2018. As a performer, Jiménez has presented her poetic shows in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Puerto Rico, and across New York City, in venues such as the Performing Arts Center (PAC), Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), IATI Theater, and El Puente, among others. Notably, her performance Blindada: Poems of Protection—a poetic show combining drums and dance—has been presented at Harvard University, Wesleyan University, and other institutions. Her poems have been published in Forgotten Lands, Periódico UNAM (Mexico), and The Los Angeles Times. She is a 2021 winner of the Salm Petry Continental Cup, Abya Yala, Copa América, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and she obtained her MFA from New York University’s Creative Writing in Spanish Program in 2022. Next year, she will publish her second book, venturing into fiction with a collection of short stories dedicated to the world of her neighborhood, San Lorenzo de los Negros Mina, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.