MACDONALD-KELCE LIBRARY
This solo exhibition showcases a new body of work by St. Petersburg-based visual artist and poet Camilo Loaiza Bonilla (b. 1998, Colombia). Bonilla, who currently serves as the Eleanor Merritt Fellow at the John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art and is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at USF, crafts experimental work that transcends media and genre. This immersive exhibition centers on eight new, experimental video poems by the artist as well as interactive digital games and a curated reading nook. While deeply tethered to the artist’s personal journey as a queer, trans first-generation immigrant, all of these works conjure larger questions about what it means to confront intergenerational trauma; how memory work can engender and complicate forgiveness; and how poetics—digital and analog—can forge a path for authenticity, belonging, and healing.
- Curated by Lesley A. Wolff, Assistant Professor, Art History and Museum Studies, Art + Design Dept., Exhibitions and Art Programs Coordinator, College of Arts and Letters at The University of Tampa.
Are You My Mother?
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From the best-selling author ofFun Home,Timemagazine's No. 1 Book of the Year, a brilliantly told graphic memoir of Alison Bechdel becoming the artist her mother wanted to be. Alison Bechdel'sFun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood . . . and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel's own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother--to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.
The Mixquiahuala Letters
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Focusing on the relationship between two fiercely independent women--Teresa, a writer, and Alicia, an artist--this epistolary novel was written as a tribute to Julio Cort zar's Hopscotch and examines Latina forms of love, gender conflict, and female friendship. Ana Castillo's groundbreaking first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters, received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and is widely studied as a feminist text on the nature of self-conflict.
Borderland Apocrypha
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The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo marked an end to the Mexican--American War, but it sparked a series of lynchings of Mexicans and subsequent erasures, and long-lasting traumas. This pattern of state-sanctioned violence committed towards communities of color continues to the present day. Borderland Apocrypha centers around the collective histories of these terrors, excavating the traumas born of turbulence at borderlands. In this debut collection, Anthony Cody responds to the destabilized, hostile landscapes and silenced histories of borderlands. His experimental poetic reinvents itself and shapeshifts in both form and space across the margin, the page, and the book in forms of resistance, signaling a reclamation and a re-occupation of what has been omitted. The poems ask the reader to engage in searching through the nested and cascading series of poems centered around familial and communal histories, structural racism, and natural ecosystems of borderlands. Relentless in its explorations, this collection shows how the past continues to inform actions, policies, and perceptions in North and Central America. Rather than a proposal for re-imagining the US/Mexico border, Cody's collection is an avant-garde examination of how borderlands have remained occupied spaces, and of the necessity of liberation to usher the earth and its people toward healing. Part auto-historia, part docu-poetic, part visual monument, part myth-making, Borderland Apocrypha unearths history in order to work toward survival, reckoning, and the building of a future that both acknowledges and moves on from tragedies of the past. Borderland Apocrypha won Omnidawn's 2018 1st/2nd Book Prize.
A Face Out of Clay
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Written at the convergence of imagination and memory, A Face Out of Clay delves deep into childhood experiences and cultural identity. Through eloquent verses and poignant imagery, alternating between narrative and lyric poems, the book paints a complicated portrait of a bi-national speaker. The poems navigate the interplay between Mexican roots and the American experience, seeking to reconcile both cultural identities. They present themes of social justice, family bonds, and the power of cultural traditions, highlighting both difficult truths and everyday beauty. The poems transport readers back in time, reliving childhood innocence, natural disasters, and political oppressors. They serve as a reminder of the power of nostalgia along with the challenges that come with recreating memories. A Face Out of Clay is a profound exploration of the human experience, inviting readers to reflect, celebrate, and connect with the transformative power of poetry.
Angels of the Americlypse
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Poetry. Fiction. Drama. Latino/Latina Studies. Edited by Carmen Giménez Smith, with John Chávez. The contemporary literary moment the anthology ANGELS OF THE AMERICLYPSE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF NEW LATIN@ WRITING attempts to capture is one defined by diversity, various points of view, literary styles and voices, topical concerns, and senses of self. Not only have these writers widened the field, they have forged new inquiry into their own experiences of the world, as they live in it and understand it. Writing in forms of lyric, short short fiction, nonfictional prose, and in various degrees and forms of experimentation, this collection represents one of the first efforts, in years, to include a critical introduction to the writers' poetry or prose, their literary work, and their own aesthetic statements meant to express their distinct literary presence in American letters.
Participation
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Art that seeks to produce situations in which relations are formed among viewers is placed in historical and theoretical context in key writings by critics and artists.The desire to move viewers out of the role of passive observers and into the role of producers is one of the hallmarks of twentieth-century art. This tendency can be found in practices and projects ranging from El Lissitzky's exhibition designs to Allan Kaprow's happenings, from minimalist objects to installation art. More recently, this kind of participatory art has gone so far as to encourage and produce new social relationships. Guy Debord's celebrated argument that capitalism fragments the social bond has become the premise for much relational art seeking to challenge and provide alternatives to the discontents of contemporary life. This publication collects texts that place this artistic development in historical and theoretical context. Participation begins with writings that provide a theoretical framework for relational art, with essays by Umberto Eco, Bertolt Brecht, Roland Barthes, Peter B rger, Jen-Luc Nancy, Edoaurd Glissant, and Felix Guattari, as well as the first translation into English of Jacques Ranci re's influential "Problems and Transformations in Critical Art." The book also includes central writings by such artists as Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica, Joseph Beuys, Augusto Boal, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. And it features recent critical and curatorial debates, with discussions by Lars Bang Larsen, Nicolas Bourriaud, Hal Foster, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Copublished with Whitechapel Art Gallery, London
Alligator Tears
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A darkly comic memoir-in-essays about the scam of the American Dream and doing whatever it takes to survive in the Sunshine State-from the award-winning author of High-Risk Homosexual "Relatable, funny and deeply heartfelt, this memoir is one not to miss."-Today "Edgar Gomez is a young writer of deep talent and enormous grace." -James McBride, New York Times bestselling author of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store A SALON AND BOOK RIOT BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (SO FAR) In Florida, one of the first things you're taught as a child is that if you're ever chased by a wild alligator, the only way to save yourself is to run away in zigzags. It's a lesson on survival that has guided much of Edgar Gomez's life. Like the night his mother had a stroke while he and his brother stood frozen at the foot of her bed, afraid she'd be angry if they called for an ambulance they couldn't afford. Gomez escaped into his mind, where he could tell himself nothing was wrong with his family. Zig. Or years later, as a broke college student, he got on his knees to put sandals on tourists' smelly, swollen feet for minimum wage at the Flip Flop Shop. After clocking out, his crew of working-class, queer, Latinx friends changed out of their uniforms in the passenger seats of each other's cars, speeding toward the relief they found at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Zag. From committing a little bankruptcy fraud for the money for veneers to those days he paid his phone bill by giving massages to closeted men on vacation, back when he and his friends would Venmo each other the same emergency twenty dollars over and over. Zig. Zag. Gomez survived this way as long as his legs would carry him. Alligator Tears is a fiercely defiant memoir-in-essays charting Gomez's quest to claw his family out of poverty by any means necessary and exposing the archetype of the humble poor person for what it is- a scam that insists we remain quiet and servile while we wait for a prize that will always be out of reach. For those chasing the American Dream and those jaded by it, Gomez's unforgettable story is a testament to finding love, purpose, and community on your own terms, smiling with all your fake teeth.
The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader
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Born in the Río Grande Valley of south Texas, independent scholar and creative writer Gloria Anzaldúa was an internationally acclaimed cultural theorist. As the author of Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa played a major role in shaping contemporary Chicano/a and lesbian/queer theories and identities. As an editor of three anthologies, including the groundbreaking This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, she played an equally vital role in developing an inclusionary, multicultural feminist movement. A versatile author, Anzaldúa published poetry, theoretical essays, short stories, autobiographical narratives, interviews, and children's books. Her work, which has been included in more than 100 anthologies to date, has helped to transform academic fields including American, Chicano/a, composition, ethnic, literary, and women's studies. This reader--which provides a representative sample of the poetry, prose, fiction, and experimental autobiographical writing that Anzaldúa produced during her thirty-year career--demonstrates the breadth and philosophical depth of her work. While the reader contains much of Anzaldúa's published writing (including several pieces now out of print), more than half the material has never before been published. This newly available work offers fresh insights into crucial aspects of Anzaldúa's life and career, including her upbringing, education, teaching experiences, writing practice and aesthetics, lifelong health struggles, and interest in visual art, as well as her theories of disability, multiculturalism, pedagogy, and spiritual activism. The pieces are arranged chronologically; each one is preceded by a brief introduction. The collection includes a glossary of Anzaldúa's key terms and concepts, a timeline of her life, primary and secondary bibliographies, and a detailed index.
Borderlands / la Frontera, 5th Edition
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Named one of the "Best Books of 1987" by Library Journal Selected by Utne Reader as part of its "Alternative Canon" in 1998 One of Hungry Mind Review's "Best 100 Books of the 20th Century" Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenged, and continue to challenge, how we think about identity. Borderlands/La Frontera remaps our understanding of what a "border" is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us. This edition, coming March 1, 2022, will be a more condensed edition, containing only the original text from 1987, and will be at a more accessible price point for readers. For those looking for a scholarly context to this crucial work, the Critical Edition is currently available. The emotional and intellectual impact of the book is disorienting and powerful...all languages are spoken, and survival depends on understanding all modes of thought. In the borderlands new creatures come into being. Anzaldúa celebrates this "new mestiza" in bold, experimental writing. -- The Village Voice Anzaldúa's pulsating weaving of innovative poetry with sparse informative prose brings us deep into the insider/outsider consciousness of the borderlands; that ancient and contemporary, crashing and blending world that divides and unites America. -- Women's Review of Books
Bareback Nightfall
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Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. "Joshua Escobar's BAREBACK NIGHTFALL is a daring collection that works as a performance art piece acted out on the page for the reader. These poems, set in alternating coasts, written in different voices and across strained dialogue, follow the relationship between DJ Ashtrae and Doctor Electronic. Two larger than life figures that live in the world of cognates and false cognates, a world in code-switch. In the tradition of Rodrigo Toscano's Collapsible Theatre Poetics, Escobar further captures the schizophrenic nature of existing in the liminal space where anything is acceptable from extreme ecstasy to abuses of power. Here is one of our most vital new voices in Latinx Avant-Garde literature."--Natalie Scenters-Zapico
Speaking Face to Face
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The first in-depth analysis of the radical feminist theory and coalitional praxis of scholar-activist María Lugones. Speaking Face to Face provides an unprecedented, in-depth look at the feminist philosophy and practice of the renowned Argentinian-born scholar-activist María Lugones. Informed by her identification as "nondiasporic Latina" and US Woman of Color, as well as her long-term commitment to grassroots organizing in Chicana/o communities, Lugones's work dovetails with, while remaining distinct from, that of other prominent transnational, decolonial, and women of color feminists. Her visionary philosophy motivates transformative modes of engaging cultural others, inviting us to create political intimacies rooted in a shared yearning for interdependence. Bringing together scholars and activists across fields, this volume charts her profound impact in and beyond the academy for the past thirty years. In so doing, it exemplifies a new method of coalitional theorizing-traversing racial, ethnic, sexual, national, gendered, political, and disciplinary borders in order to cultivate learning, embrace heterogeneity, and provide a unique framework for engaging contemporary debates about identity, oppression, and activism. Across thirteen original contributions, authors address issues of intersectionality, colonial and decolonial subjectivities, the multiplicity and the coloniality of gender, indigenous spiritualities and cosmologies, pluralist and women of color feminisms, radical multiculturalism, popular education, and resistance to multiple oppressions. The book also includes a rare interview with María Lugones and an afterword by Paula Moya, ultimately offering both new critical resources for longstanding admirers of Lugones and a welcome introduction for newcomers to her groundbreaking work.
Latino Poetry: the Library of America Anthology (LOA #382)
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***Top pick for Hispanic Heritage Month by NYT best-selling author Elizabeth Acevedo for Good Morning America*** This landmark Latinx poetry collection offers "a wondrous journey through the passions, the ideas, and the diversity of a people redefining what it means to be American" (Hector Tobar, Pulitzer Prize winner) Includes more than 180 poets, spanning from the 17th century to today, and presents those poems written in Spanish in the original and in English translation For nearly five centuries, the rich tapestry of Latino poetry has been woven from a wealth of languages and cultures-a "tremendous continental mixturao," in the words of the poet Tato Laviera. Now, in an unprecedented anthology edited by the poet and critic Rigoberto Gonzalez, Library of America brings together more than 180 poets whose poems bear witness to the beauty and power of this vital and expanding tradition- its profound engagement with pasts both mythical and historical, its reckoning with the complexities of language, land, and identity, and its vision of a nation enriched by the stories of immigrants, exiles, refugees, and their descendants. There are a brilliant array of contemporary voices here as well, spinning out the tapestry of Latino poetry in daring new directions. Taking the measure of this current renaissance, the anthology culminates with the most comprehensive survey of twenty-first century Latino poetry yet published. Featured poets include- Jose Marti Julia de Burgos Sandra Cisneros Pedro Pietri Juan Felipe Herrera Jaime Manrique Javier Zamora Aracelis Girmay Natalie Diaz U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Lim n, and 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner Brandon Som. This groundbreaking collection captures as never before the richness, diversity, and power of the Latino poetic imagination.
MyOTHER TONGUE
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"How do we trace shifts of home or syllable, the history of becoming in language? We show what's passed on with the mother-milk, the blood-words, pushed from the body onto the page. That's what these poems do, spilling beautifully, forming in the mouth of the reader. This is the 'ark built to survive': our things built with words circling, mother-to-daughter-to- mother-to-daughter." -- Eleni Sikelianos "Here are poems that reckon with the histories of family, generations, language and love: how our tongues are mothered or not, how we are given to and abandoned. Alcal#65533; writes, 'What good is it to erect/ of absence/ a word?' Tough and gorgeous, smart and touching, these poems are offerings that tie, untie, unite, entice." -- Hoa Nguyen "Rosa Alcal#65533;'s new poemario MYOTHER TONGUE begins in the archives of what has yet to be written. She writes with precision and dynamism from the borders between death (of a mother) and birth (of a daughter). What a body produces, and what produces a body: labor, trauma, memory, sacrifice, pain, danger, and language formed both on the tongue and in the culture and the spaces between what can be said and what is missing, the linguistic and existential problem of not having the right words. The darknesses in Alcal#65533;'s work emerge from what happens when we don't see ourselves in the languages that both form and destroy us as we labor in this 'dream called money.' Alcal#65533; is a {{un}}documentarian of the highest order, a {{un}}documentarian of what history and memory try to erase. Her poems are urgent, demanding and haunting." -- Daniel Borzutzky
Dictee
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Newly restored, this version of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's masterpiece honors the author's original intentions and vision for the book. Originally published in 1982, Dictee is a classic of modern Asian American literature. Dictee is the best-known work of the multidisciplinary Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. This restored edition, produced in partnership with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), reflects Cha's original vision for the book as an art object in its authentic form, featuring: The original cover High-quality reproductions of the interior layout Dictee tells the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha's mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles), and Cha herself. This dynamic autobiography: Structures the story in nine parts around the Greek Muses Deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry Links the women's stories to explore the trauma of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory it causes The result is an enduringly powerful, beautiful, unparalleled work.
Dear Memory
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A Firecracker Award Finalist in Creative Nonfiction An Electric Literature Favorite Nonfiction Book of the Year A Kirkus Best Book of the Month From poet Victoria Chang, a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations. For Victoria Chang, memory "isn't something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally." It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered. Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted collages and missives on trauma, loss, and Americanness, Victoria Chang grasps on to a sense of self that grief threatens to dissipate. In letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as the imagination, Dear Memory offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories.
Black Bell
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Sweeping from the eighteenth century to futurist fabulations, Black Bell harmonizes poetry with performance art practices in an investigation of fugitivity. Inspired by the nineteenth century image of an enslaved woman wearing iron horns and bells, Alison C. Rollins's Black Bell continues an exploration of cataloging individual experience and collective memory. As Rollins sets out to resuscitate and embody the archive, we see a chorus of historical figures like Eliza Harris, Henry "Box" Brown, and Lear Green; readers can listen in as Phillis Wheatley takes a Turing test or venture through Dante's Inferno remixed with Wu-Tang Clan's 36 Chambers. Poems travel across time and space, between the eighteenth century and futuristic fabulations, vibrating with fugitive frequencies, sounds of survival, and nerve-wracking notes tuned toward love and liberation. Black Bell navigates what it means to be both invisible and spectacle, hidden and on display, allowing lyric language to become the material for fashioning wearable sculptures akin to Nick Cave's "soundsuits." Integrating performance art practices, metalwork, and sonic, Black Bell becomes multimedia meditation on freedom seeking, furthering the possibilities of both the page and the canvas of the poet's body.
The Body Keeps the Score
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A pioneering researcher and one of the world's foremost experts on traumatic stress offers a bold new paradigm for healing Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Such experiences inevitably leave traces on minds, emotions, and even on biology. Sadly, trauma sufferers frequently pass on their stress to their partners and children. Renowned trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he transforms our understanding of traumatic stress, revealing how it literally rearranges the brain's wiring--specifically areas dedicated to pleasure, engagement, control, and trust. He shows how these areas can be reactivated through innovative treatments including neurofeedback, mindfulness techniques, play, yoga, and other therapies. Based on Dr. van der Kolk's own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score offers proven alternatives to drugs and talk therapy--and a way to reclaim lives.
Spit Temple
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Poetry/Performance. Latino/Latina Studies. Art. Edited by Rosa Alcalá. SPIT TEMPLE collects texts and transcriptions of Vicuña's uncategorizable improvised performances, which combine singing, movement, chants, and stories. Also included are a critical introduction by Rosa Alcalá, a poetic memoir by Vicuña (translated by Alcalá) addressing her life in performance, and a series of response pieces from contemporary writers including Juliana Spahr, Rodrigo Toscano, and Maria Damon. "Vicuña's work, at its very essense, is 'a way of remembering'--as if exile and recall joined to unravel an 'autobiography in debris;' as one personal story within a larger narative."--Roberto Tejada
Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry
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100 Poets for the Present and Future. The Essential Voices series intends to correct misrepresentation and misunderstanding in the broader culture. It has at its heart the ancient idea that poetry can reveal our shared humanity. This anthology features 100 poets who illuminate the queer experience in the U.S., including Kaveh Akbar, Rick Barot, Frank Bidart, Richard Blanco, Jericho Brown, Franny Choi, CAConrad, Natalie Diaz, Mark Doty, Nikky Finney, Nikki Giovanni, Marilyn Hacker, Robin Coste Lewis, Timothy Liu, Eileen Myles, Carl Phillips, Justin Phillip Reed, Kay Ryan, Sam Sax, Richard Siken, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, and many others. Diverse in styles, subjects, and demographics, the book is a mirror to the lived experience of nearly one century of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender poets. "I come to this anthology having languished, having felt benumbed, having come to question, at my very core, poetry's value, its potency, as we contend with our current brand of American tyranny, our Hour of Lead. As I read ESSENTIAL QUEER VOICES OF U.S. POETRY, I experience an incremental awakening, or re-awakening. Every poem, every phrase in every poem, clicks a small switch in me that had been shut down, repairs a blown fuse, brings a wound into the light, provokes it into being, or staunches it. The exhilarative truth-telling and wit, the poems that walk the page with a humble gait, and those that ego-strut, the foundational voices and the newly arrived, remind me of what poetry has been in similarly oppressive times, its capacity for liberative endurance. From the first lines of the opening poem, Frank Bidart's 'Queer'--'Lie to yourself about this and you will / forever lie about everything'--an entreaty against self-deception, we find ourselves in veracity's realm, where language reigns free. ... The lines of these poems accordion, inhale, exhale, serpentine, straighten, curl. A carnival of approaches to diction, positionality, structure, song. This anthology is not representative of a sector of American poetry. It is American poetry. The party contains multitudes and hints at multitudes to come. When I reach the last lines of the final poem, torrin a. greathouse's 'On Using the Wo|men's Bathroom,' I am no longer numb."--Diane Seuss, winner of the Pulitzer Prize Poetry. LGBTQ+ Studies.
Citizen
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* Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry * * Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism * Winner of the NAACP Image Award * Winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize * Winner of the PEN Open Book Award * ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, NPR. Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Slate, Time Out New York, Vulture, Refinery 29, and many more . . . A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.
Dormilona
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dormilona is a bilingual book of poetry exploring dream states, distance, and the rituals of sleep in Venezuelan culture. In these poems, the fluidity of living in two languages reflects the elusive nature of time and memory, centering on the speaker's relationship with her mother, grandmother, and homeland. The ancient forests around Mount Roraima and the bright pink sands of Playa Colorada inhabit her dreams, and in these topographies she finds harmony with the patterns of brain waves in her sleep studies. Meaning both "nightgown" and "sleepyhead" in Venezuelan Spanish, dormilona weaves a neural network linking sleep to language memory, family, geography, and history.
Ghost Of
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Ghost Of is a mourning song, not an exorcism or un-haunting of that which haunts, but attuned attention, unidirectional reaching across time, space, and distance to reach loved ones, ancestors, and strangers. By working with, in, and around the photographs that her brother left behind (from which he cut himself out before his death), Nguyen wrestles with what remains: memory, physical voids, and her family captured around an empty space. Ghost Of was selected by Terrance Hayes to win Omnidawn's Open Poetry Book Contest. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize.
Root Fractures
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*One of Time's Must-Read Books of 2024* *One of Electric Lit's Best Poetry Collections of 2024* *One of LitHub's Poetry Books to Read in 2024* *One of The Millions's Must-Read Poetry Books of Winter 2024* National Book Award finalist Diana Khoi Nguyen's second poetry collection, a haunting of a family's past upon its present, and a frank reckoning with how loss and displacement transform mothers and daughters across generations. In Root Fractures, Diana Khoi Nguyen excavates the moments of rupture in a family: a mother who was forced underground after the Fall of Saigon, a father who engineered a new life in California as an immigrant, a brother who cut himself out of every family picture before cutting himself out of their lives entirely. And as new generations of the family come of age, opportunities to begin anew blend with visitations from the past. Through poems of disarming honesty and personal risk, Nguyen examines what takes root after a disaster and how we can make a story out of the broken pieces of our lives. As Terrance Hayes writes, "'There is nothing that is not music' for this poet. Poetry is found in the gaps, silences, and ruptures of history." This astonishing second collection renders poetry into an act of kintsugi, embellishing what is broken in a family's legacy so that it can be seen in a new light.
The Man Who Could Move Clouds
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PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * From the bestselling author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree, comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic memoir reclaiming her family's otherworldly legacy. A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, NPR, VULTURE, PEOPLE, BOSTON GLOBE, VANITY FAIR, ESQUIRE, & MORE "Rojas Contreras reacquaints herself with her family's past, weaving their stories with personal narrative, unraveling legacies of violence, machismo and colonialism... In the process, she has written a spellbinding and genre-defying ancestral history."--New York Times Book Review For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political violence of 1980s and '90s Colombia, in a house bustling with her mother's fortune-telling clients, she was a hard child to surprise. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with what the family called "the secrets": the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. And as the first woman to inherit "the secrets," Rojas Contreras' mother was just as powerful. Mami delighted in her ability to appear in two places at once, and she could cast out even the most persistent spirits with nothing more than a glass of water. This legacy had always felt like it belonged to her mother and grandfather, until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, Rojas Contreras suffered a head injury that left her with amnesia. As she regained partial memory, her family was excited to tell her that this had happened before: Decades ago Mami had taken a fall that left her with amnesia, too. And when she recovered, she had gained access to "the secrets." In 2012, spurred by a shared dream among Mami and her sisters, and her own powerful urge to relearn her family history in the aftermath of her memory loss, Rojas Contreras joins her mother on a journey to Colombia to disinter Nono's remains. With Mami as her unpredictable, stubborn, and often amusing guide, Rojas Contreras traces her lineage back to her Indigenous and Spanish roots, uncovering the violent and rigid colonial narrative that would eventually break her mestizo family into two camps: those who believe "the secrets" are a gift, and those who are convinced they are a curse. Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, resurrected Colombian history, and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the incomprehensible and into her inheritance. The result is a luminous testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.
Citizen Illegal
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"Citizen Illegal is right on time, bringing both empathy and searing critique to the fore as a nation debates the very humanity of the people who built it." --Eve Ewing, author of Electric Arches In this stunning debut, poet José Olivarez explores the stories, contradictions, joys, and sorrows that embody life in the spaces between Mexico and America. He paints vivid portraits of good kids, bad kids, families clinging to hope, life after the steel mills, gentrifying barrios, and everything in between. Drawing on the rich traditions of Latinx and Chicago writers like Sandra Cisneros and Gwendolyn Brooks, Olivarez creates a home out of life in the in-between. Combining wry humor with potent emotional force, Olivarez takes on complex issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and immigration using an everyday language that invites the reader in. Olivarez has a unique voice that makes him a poet to watch. José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. He is a co-host of the podcast, The Poetry Gods. A winner of fellowships from Poets House, The Bronx Council On The Arts, The Poetry Foundation, and The Conversation Literary Festival, his work has been published in The BreakBeat Poets and elsewhere. He is the Marketing Manager at Young Chicago Authors.
Gender Queer: a Memoir Deluxe Edition
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2020 ALA Alex Award Winner 2020 Stonewall -- Israel Fishman Non-fiction Award Honor Book In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Then e created Gender Queer. Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fan fiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: It is a useful and touching guide on gender identity--what it means and how to think about it--for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere. This special deluxe hardcover edition of Gender Queer features a brand-new cover, exclusive art and sketches, a foreword from ND Stevenson, Lumberjanes writer and creator of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and an afterword from Maia Kobabe.
Good Talk
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A "beautiful and eye-opening" (Jacqueline Woodson), "hilarious and heart-rending" (Celeste Ng) graphic memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us, from the acclaimed author of The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing. NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Chicago Tribune * The New York Public Library * Publishers Weekly AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review * Time * BuzzFeed * Esquire * Library Journal * Kirkus Reviews "How brown is too brown?" "Can Indians be racist?" "What does real love between really different people look like?" Like many six-year-olds, Mira Jacob's half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, has questions about everything. At first they are innocuous enough, but as tensions from the 2016 election spread from the media into his own family, they become much, much more complicated. Trying to answer him honestly, Mira has to think back to where she's gotten her own answers: her most formative conversations about race, color, sexuality, and, of course, love. Written with humor and vulnerability, this deeply relatable graphic memoir is a love letter to the art of conversation--and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/OPEN BOOK AWARD "Jacob's earnest recollections are often heartbreaking, but also infused with levity and humor. What stands out most is the fierce compassion with which she parses the complexities of family and love."--Time "Good Talk uses a masterful mix of pictures and words to speak on life's most uncomfortable conversations."--io9 "Mira Jacob just made me toss everything I thought was possible in a book-as-art-object into the garbage. Her new book changes everything."--Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy
Amateur
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*Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction *Shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award *Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize One of The Times UK's Best Memoirs of 2018, BuzzFeed's Best Nonfiction of 2018, Autostraddle's Best LGBT Books of 2018, and 52 Insight's Favorite Nonfiction Books of 2018 A "no-holds-barred examination of masculinity" (BuzzFeed) and violence from award-winning author Thomas Page McBee. In this "refreshing and radical" (The Guardian) narrative, Thomas McBee, a trans man, sets out to uncover what makes a man--and what being a "good" man even means--through his experience training for and fighting in a charity boxing match at Madison Square Garden. A self-described "amateur" at masculinity, McBee embarks on a wide-ranging exploration of gender in society, examining sexism, toxic masculinity, and privilege. As he questions the limitations of gender roles and the roots of masculine aggression, he finds intimacy, hope, and even love in the experience of boxing and in his role as a man in the world. Despite personal history and cultural expectations, "Amateur is a reminder that the individual can still come forward and fight" (The A.V. Club). "Sharp and precise, open and honest," (Women's Review of Books), McBee's writing asks questions "relevant to all people, trans or not" (New York Newsday). Through interviews with experts in neuroscience, sociology, and critical race theory, he constructs a deft and thoughtful examination of the role of men in contemporary society. Amateur is a graceful and uncompromising look at gender by a fearless, fiercely honest writer.
Troubling the Line
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The first of its kind, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, gathers together a diverse range of 55 poets with varying aesthetics and backgrounds. In addition to generous samples of poetry by each trans writer, the book also includes "poetics statements"--reflections by each poet that provide context for their work covering a range of issues from identification and embodiment to language and activism. Poets include Samuel Ace, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Micha Cardenas, kari edwards, Duriel Harris, Joy Ladin, Dawn Lundy Martin, Eileen Myles, Trish Salah, Max Wolf Valerio, John Wieners, Kit Yan, and more.
Raíces
2022/2025
Stop-motion poem
Looped digital video, 1:44
“I ‘borrowed’ the family photo albums from my parents’ house and used what I found as a way into the past—not just my own, but my whole family’s. It was a means of unearthing what was buried for so long.” -– Camilo Loaiza Bonilla
Dios te salve, Maria
2023
Stop-motion poem
Looped digital video, 1:10
Welcome to FLORIDA LIVING!
2023
Desktop documentary
Looped digital video with sound, 2:36
“My childhood home was the first place that we called our own in the U.S., built right after my parents became legal permanent residents…We lost that house as a result of the 2008-2012 financial recession, so much security suddenly taken away from us, stability in the suburbs—part of the promised American Dream—ripped from our hands. So, you can probably imagine how it felt to read this kind of bizarre Zillow ad—with every other word in all-caps and every other sentence ending in an exclamation mark—for this home you still ache for, a site of deep wounds you still haven’t healed from. The final sentence of the ad is simply ‘Welcome to FLORIDA LIVING!’” -– Camilo Loaiza Bonilla
Don Mee Choi writes in DMZ Colony, “My memory lives inside my father’s camera… Memory’s memory. Memory’s child.” As a first-generation Latine immigrant—looking through the layered lens of trans & queerness—I seek to unwind intergenerational silence and unearth ancestral memory. I use my ancestors’ stories and photographs, their traditions and videos, to create sites of radical healing and joy in the face of generational grief. Merging creative writing and visual art, poetry and collage, video and gameplay, I invite hands-on engagement and participation in the work for those who venture to join me in challenging the social structures that today weigh heavy on our communities. With this, I create space for vulnerability, communal healing, and hope for better futures.
-– Camilo Loaiza Bonilla
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Don Mee Choi escribe en DMZ Colony: << Mi memoria vive dentro de la cámara de mi padre... La memoria de la memoria. El hijo de la memoria >>. Como inmigrante latine de primera generación—a través del lente multifacético de la identidad trans y queer—busco desenredar el silencio intergeneracional y desenterrar la memoria ancestral. Utilizo las historias y fotografías de mis antepasados, sus tradiciones y vídeos, para crear espacios de sanación radical y alegría frente al dolor generacional. Combinando la escritura creativa y el arte visual, la poesía y el collage, el vídeo y los videojuegos, invito a participar y colaborar en este trabajo a quienes se atreven a acompañarme en el desafío de las estructuras sociales que hoy pesan sobre nuestras comunidades. Con esto, creo un espacio para la vulnerabilidad, la sanación comunal y la esperanza de mejores futuros.
-– Camilo Loaiza Bonilla
https://camiloloaizabonilla.com/
Camilo Loaiza Bonilla (he/him/él) is a Latine writer working to unwind generational silence as a queer, trans, first-generation immigrant. He received his MFA from the University of South Florida and, with support from Macondo Writer’s Workshop, Tin House, Graywolf Press, and Black Lawrence Press, his work is in or forthcoming from Frontier Poetry, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Graywolf Lab, Quarterly West, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. Exploring the intersection of poetry and visual art, he is the 2025-2026 Eleanor Merritt Fellow at The John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art and the inaugural Poet-in-Residence at Hillsborough Community College’s Art Galleries.
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