The Halo-Halo Review is pleased to interview authors in the aftermath of their books’ releases. This issue's featured authors include Christian Hanz Lozada.
What is your most recent book?
He’s a Color Until He’s Not (Moon Tide Press, CA 2023)
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What has been the response/what has surprised you most about the response?
The most surprising thing was my students and coworkers in an APIDA college program I help run picked it up and are using it as material for a breakout session at the Asian and Pacific Americans in Higher Education conference. As they talk about the poems, I get super embarrassed and find ways to leave the room.
Tell me something not obvious or known about the book.
There are poems in here I will not read in public. They are four “found” poems that set up the first sections of this book and are lifted from the last letters my grandma received before her daughter, my aunt, disappeared completely. They point to why she ran away at 14. The rest of the book is a response to that absence that reverberates from before I was born.
What are you working on right now?
A joint chapbook with my best friend and historian who passed away. We were working on a history of Charles Bukowski’s San Pedro, the city he spent the most prolific years of his life in, with me researching his poems for references and her exploring the history of those references. The book has changed with her passing, and it is becoming a bit of the history of place and my response to his descriptions distanced by decades, skin color, and death.
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Christian Hanz Lozada (he/him) is the son of an immigrant Filipino and a descendent of the Southern Confederacy and knows the shape of hope and exclusion. He authored the poetry collection He’s a Color, Until He’s Not (Moon Tide Press) and co-authored Leave with More Than You Came With (Arroyo Seco Press). His poems have appeared in Hawaii Pacific Review (Pushcart Nominee), Bamboo Ridge Press, among others. Christian has featured at the Autry Museum and Beyond Baroque. He lives in San Pedro, CA and uses his MFA to teach his neighbors and their kids at Los Angeles Harbor College. To order signed copies of his book, you can email him at poetlozada@gmail.com
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