Carlos Lara

What does it mean to be a Nashvillian? A black Nashvillian? A white Nashvillian? What does it mean to be an organizer, an ally, an elected official, an agent for change? Deep Dish Conversations is a running online interview series in which host Jerome Moore sits down over pizza with prominent Nashville leaders and community members to talk about the past, present, and future of the city and what it means to live here. The result is honest conversation about racism, housing, policing, poverty, and more in a safe, brave, person-to-person environment that allows for disagreement.Deep Dish Conversations is a curated collection of the most striking interviews from the first few seasons, including a foreword by Dr. Sekou Franklin, an introduction by Moore, and contextual introductions to each interviewee. Figures like Judge Sheila Calloway, comedian Josh Black, anti-racism speaker Tim Wise, organizer Jorge Salles Diaz, and many more explore their wide-ranging perspectives on social change in a city in the midst of massive demographic and ideological shifts. For anyone in any twenty-first-century city, Deep Dish Conversations offers a lot to think about—and a lot of ways to think about it.

In Like Bismuth When I Enter, Carlos Lara engages in the purely creative aspect of language—its synthesis of dream and waking world. In these vibrant, hallucinatory poems, inspired by the element bismuth and its iridescent, surrealist structure, Lara attempts to produce a collective surge of new imagery, new mind states, and structural undoings. Like Bismuth When I Enter captures that moment when the universe strikes one with the unmistakable reminder of mystery via the quotidian and the elemental.