Free with RSVP
Join us for the October meeting of SFMOMA’s Works on Paper Book Club with this month’s moderator, Assistant Curator of Photography Delphine Sims, who has selected Eat the Mouth That Feeds You by Carribean Fragoza, published by City Lights.
Sims will open with a short talk on the book and its connections to SFMOMA’s current exhibition Graciela Iturbide: Between Two Worlds — including the cover photograph, which was taken by Iturbide — before leading the group through a discussion guided by her own questions.
Doors open at 5:30 p.m for informal discussion amongst book club members.
We encourage everyone to read as much of the book as they can, but don’t let an unfinished last chapter stop you from joining us! Come ready to discuss — just know that all plot points are fair game.
Please note that space is limited and advance registration is required. RSVP here.
Eat the Mouth That Feeds You by Carribean Fragoza is available for purchase in the Museum Store or for checkout at your local library.
Read and discuss books chosen by SFMOMA curators, staff, or exhibiting artists at our monthly book club, Works on Paper. Selections are personal: books that inspired work, shaped thinking, or connect to ideas alive in the galleries right now. From fiction and biography to art criticism, poetry, and more, the common thread is that the book opens something up for the reader. At each session, participants sit down and explore the book of the month together with the person who selected it.
Art asks us to slow down — to stand before something and truly look. Works on Paper is a book club built on that same instinct.
Carribean Fragoza’s debut collection of stories reside in the domestic surreal, featuring an unusual gathering of Latinx and Chicanx voices from both sides of the US/Mexico border, and universes beyond. Fragoza’s imperfect characters are drawn with a sympathetic tenderness as they struggle against circumstances and conditions designed to defeat them. Victories are excavated from the rubble of personal hardship, and women’s wisdom is brutally forged from the violence of history that continues to unfold.
Carribean Fragoza is a fiction writer and journalist. The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Fragoza was raised in South El Monte, California. After graduating from UCLA, Fragoza completed the Creative Writing MFA Program at CalArts. Her collection of stories Eat the Mouth That Feeds You was published in 2021 by City Lights and was a finalist for a 2022 PEN Award. Her co-edited compilation of essays East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte was published by Rutgers University Press and her collection of essays Writing Home: New Terrains of California is forthcoming with Angel City Press. She has published in Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times, Zyzzyva, Alta, BOMB, Huizache, KCET, the Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtNews, and Aperture Magazine. She is the prose editor at Huizache magazine and creative nonfiction and poetry editor at Boom California, a journal of UC Press. Fragoza is the founder and co-director of South El Monte Arts Posse, an interdisciplinary arts collective. She lives in the San Gabriel Valley in Greater Los Angeles. More can be found on her website: carribeanfragoza.com.
Delphine Sims is an assistant curator in the Department of Photography at SFMOMA. She completed her PhD in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley. She was a predoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts within the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Exhibitions she has curated and co-curated include: (Re)Constructing History, Around Group F.64, and Graciela Iturbide: Between Two Worlds. Her writing can be found in exhibition catalogues, Aperture, Matte magazine, History of Photography, and the Believer. In 2026, Delphine was selected for the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Arts Leadership Praxis.
Accessible seating is available at this event.
Presenting Sponsor of Thursday Night Live is Zoox.
Meaningful support is provided by Diana Nelson and John Atwater.
Additional support is provided by the Yerba Buena Partnership.