Kylee Pastore Asirvatham
Lucas Iberico Lozada
English
Assistant Professor
Bio
Lucas Iberico Lozada is an incoming Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at City College. His writing—short fiction, reporting, essays, and criticism—has been published in a wide variety of outlets, including The New York Times, The Nation, and the Brazilian magazine Piauí. He has worked as a reporter for the Reuters newswire in São Paulo, Lima, and New York, and as an editor at Popula and Paste. A graduate of the MFA program at Temple University, he is ABD in the Creative Writing & Literature program at the University of Southern California. His current book project is a travelogue set in and around Christopher Columbus’s many tombs.
1. What questions, ideas, or creative concerns are at the center of your work right now?
I’ve long been fascinated by the way our ideas about the past influence the present. I’m also interested in exploring how people forge identities across borders, especially in the “greater Americas”: North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean.
2. What drew you to CCNY and to teaching within the Division of Humanities and the Arts?
In the fall of 2018, when I was teaching my first-ever college writing class, I stumbled onto Adrienne Rich’s essays about teaching at City College in the late ’60s and early ’70s. I’m sure a lot has changed at CCNY since then, but I remain inspired by the long legacy of City College students and faculty banding together to insist on the importance of excellent humanistic and artistic educations for all in New York.
3. What do you hope CCNY students will experience, discover, or reconsider in your classroom?
Writing is a solitary task, but reading and being read places us in community. I hope my workshops offer City College students a community, one that gives them the strength and motivation to head back to their desks and keep going until they find their way to the right word in the right place, as the old saw has it.
4. How has a particular text, artwork, mentor, place, or experience shaped the direction of your work?
Recently, I’ve fallen under the spell of Spanish author Javier Cercas. I love the way his books blur the boundary between fiction and nonfiction and force the reader to grapple with the way that “historia” (history) boils down to the “historias” (stories) we tell and retell. I’m also a great admirer of the Dominican punk-prophet Rita Indiana, whose novels are a welcome reminder that excavating the horrors of the past is best done with a wicked sense of humor.
5. What are you most excited to contribute to—or explore within—the intellectual and creative community at CCNY?
I look forward to expanding City College’s offerings in “creative nonfiction”—a funky, ill-defined concept. I hope my students will join me in running a long experiment to see just what can be done and made under that title.