Sex Work, Politics And Robbing The Rich

A Berkeley native, Aya de Leon has long married social justice activism and the arts, producing subversive work in popular forms. From 1998 to 2008, she toured extensively as a spoken-word artist, contributing to a San Francisco Slam Team that won regionals and developing the acclaimed hip-hop theater show Thieves in the Temple: Since 2006, she’s been director of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley, which teaches empowerment through artistic expression. In “Uptown Thief,” her debut novel out this week, de Leon uses commercial fiction to address complex social issues. The book follows a Puerto Rican woman, a survivor of sexual violence, who establishes a women’s health clinic providing services to sex workers. Within sex work, you can’t make a move in any direction without there being some kind of political implication, because you’re dealing with this intersection of commerce, sexuality, gender, race, nationality. De Leon started writing novels in the ’90s, but says she “really got detoured” onto the spoken-word/hip-hop theater path, largely because of the community and direct engagement it provided. “I’m really interested in breaking down a lot of the different literary barriers, one being the really intense barrier between literary and commercial fiction,” she said. We also have the ‘have integrity or sell out’ binary, and I think I’ve written something really commercial and I don’t think I sold out; I think I said what I wanted to say. [...] that’s a binary that’s really important for me to break down because the industry has the potential to really boost the signal and create a larger platform, and I don’t want to believe that progressive ideas around women’s health care and wealth redistribution need to be in some kind of political fringe; I want those issues to be as mainstreamed as possible. Booksmith premieres a reboot of its Bookswap series, which now features a discounted price , with Val Brelinski, author of the debut novel “The Girl Who Slept With God.”