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José Vadi is an essayist, poet, playwright and film producer living in Oakland, Calif. A two-time national slam poetry champion, Vadi received the San Francisco Foundation's Shenson Performing Arts Award for his debut play, a eulogy for three, produced by Marc Bamuthi Joseph's Living Word Project. Vadi is the author of SoMa Lurk, a collection of photos and poems published by Project Kalahati. His writing has most recently appeared in Catapult, McSweeney's, the East Bay Express, New Life Quarterly, Amadeus, the Los Angeles Review of Books and SFMOMA's Open Space. Inter State (Soft Skull, September 14, 2021) is his debut collection of poetic, linked essays investigating the past and present state of California, its conflicting histories and its impact on a writer's family and life.
On your nightstand now:
Just finished The Hard Crowd by Rachel Kushner and The Most Fun Thing by Kyle Beachy, and reading the latest Hanif Abdurraqib collection, In the Distance by Hernan Diaz and the latest issues of Free Skate Mag.
Favorite book when you were a child:
No idea of the title but literally the first book I remember wanting was this book about insects and animals in the children's section of the Pomona Public Library. I remember it had cool diagrams on how to build chicken coops and whatnot. It had zero to little impact other than a desire to go the library. Actually, in fifth grade The Giver was great, kind of like a G-rated 1984. My local school district attempted to ban it.
Your top five authors:
Hard to name five, but I can say whenever I enter any bookstore, I pretty much look for César Aira and Percival Everett books first.
Book you've faked reading:
Probably all of Chuck Klosterman's books.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel--I read this while writing Inter State and it had a profound impact on the way I could conceptualize what a collection of essays could look like, especially the way different essays speak to one another and create this world and tone throughout Chee's work.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Fernando Flores Tears of the Trufflepig--it's a gorgeously colorful cover that has a matte finish, and accurately acts as a magic door into this wild tale of genetically modified organisms, psychedelics, classism and violence lurking somewhere between south Texas, north Mexico and the world(s) Flores creates in his prose. I felt like I was on a hallucinogenic throughout the second half of the book. I'm looking forward to reading his first collection of stories, Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas.
Book you hid from your parents:
I pretty much pillaged their collection so nothing really to hide other than issues of Hit Parader.
Book that changed your life:
It's probably James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time or Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. The books showcased how a writer can weave personal reflections, experiences, observations, analysis and more into profoundly urgent and necessary texts, ones that spark debates that he too would be ready to attend, defend and rearticulate the larger purposes behind his craft.
Relatedly, George Orwell's nonfiction, like Homage to Catalonia and Down and Out in Paris and London, left pretty impactful marks on my writing, even though I was mainly writing poetry at the time when I read it in high school.
Favorite line from a book:
"You got flies in your eyes" --from Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. It was a bit of a joke between my cousin and I growing up.
Five books you'll never part with:
César Aira, How I Became a Nun
William Attaway, Blood on the Forge
Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile
Percival Everett, Telephone
Federico García Lorca, Poeta en Nueva York
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Seeing Red by Lina Meruane from Deep Vellum Press. I felt like I was buzzing and sweating the entire time I was reading it, the prose was so consuming, which is obviously the desired outcome of any literary experience.