IMPORTANT JOINT-ANNOUNCEMENT from Letras Latinas/Red Hen Press

 

Letras Latinas and Red Hen Press are pleased to announce that TWO manuscripts will be selected by final judge Orlando Ricardo Menes for publication by Red Hen Press.

The postmark deadline remains January 15, 2012

These two manuscripts will constitute the first two winners of the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize.

Both authors will be offered a standard book contract and each manuscript will be published, one in 2013 and one in 2015.

All other perks of winning the prize remain the same for each poet. 

Red Hen Press has been steadily increasing the lead time for books in its publication schedule. Marketing director William Goldstein had this to say:

“Longer lead times let us think harder about how best to send a book off into the world. This arrangement will allow us to better serve books and authors past, present, and future.”

 “In some respects, our partnership with Red Hen Press is, in my view, a publishing initiative whose aim, with the help of our judge, is to provide a home for worthy book-length manuscripts at an independent press with a solid track record,” said Francisco Aragón, director of Letras Latinas. "We’d like to emphasize the collaborative nature of this initiative, which couldn't exist without the participation of the poets who send in their manuscripts."

Letras Latinas' A Year in Poetry, 2011

Poetry collections published this year by a Latino or Latina poet.

We Had More to Say (Sunstone Press)

Raymond Zachary Ortiz

Always Messing With Them Boys (West End Press)

Jessica Helen Lopez
Spring and All (New Directions)
William Carlos Williams 
Saborami (Chain Links)

Cecilia Vicuña

Hoodwinked (Sarabande Books)

David Hernandez

The Man Who Wrote on Water (Hanging Loose Press)

Pablo Medina

The City She Was (Center for Literary Publishing)

Carmen Giménez Smith

In the Shadow of Al-Andalus (Coffee House Press)

Victor Hernández Cruz

Black Blossoms (Four Way Books)

Rigoberto González

Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems (Wings Press) 

Lorna Dee Cervantes

Backyard Migration Route (Finishing Line Press)

Emily Pérez

Kingdom Animalia (Boa Editions)

Aracelis Girmay

The Shallow End of Sleep (Tia Chucha)

Jose Antonio Rodriguez

The Trouble Ball (W.W. Norton & Company)

Martín Espada

The Open Light: Poets from Notre Dame (University of Notre Dame Press)

Orlando Ricardo Menes

Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press)

Emma Trelles

Empire (University of Arizona Press)

Xochiquetzal Candelaria

Next Extinct Mammal (Greenhouse Review Press)

Ruben Quesada

Hi-Density Politics (BlazeVOX Books)

Urayoán Noel

Breaking Bread with Darkness: Book 1: The Esai Poems (Sherman Asher Publishing)

Jimmy Santiago Baca

Breath & Bone (Finishing Line Press)

Thelma T. Reina

Here Lies Lalo: The Collected Poems of Abelardo Delgado (Arte Publico Press)

Abelardo Delgado

Handmade Memories (E-Chapbook)

Guy LeCharles González

Steady, My Gaze (Tebot Bach)

Marie-Elizabeth Mali

Latino/a Poetry Now Featured Poet, Rosa Alcalá on Words on a Wire

Rosa Alcalá, who took part in installment one of Latino/a Poetry Now at Harvard University, is the current poet featured in Words on a Wire’s “Poetic License” segment. Words on a Wire, a radio show on poetry, fiction and issues of concern to writers and the community at large is hosted by Daniel Chacón and Benjamin Sáenz.

Like a finely-honed scalpel, in this roughly ten minute long segment, Rosa Alcalá dissects the Occupy Wall Street Movement’s demand at heart and in doing so shows us the human tissues behind the abstract language so commonly employed by the popular media in their attempts to dehumanize and discredit the movement and the people who most seek to benefit from it: the unemployed or underemployed, those who compose the ball in this game of labor and markets and are tucked away at whistle’s final call.

Taking us through a hallucinating journey from office temp to graduate student to professor at UTEP, Rosa reflects on what it means to be at the mercy of those who control the rules and regulations of the labor game. Never a stranger to the whims of this game, Alcalá evokes her fight with cancer to further testify to these crimes of our times: had she not left her job as an office temp to pursue an education she might not have survived her cancer. It was precisely being part of an institution of higher learning that gave her access to a top surgeon in that field. Alcalá reflects on the fact that unlike her, there are many who will never have the option of leaving behind hazardous working conditions and will be condemned to the violence of poverty. Rosa sums it best when she states:  

“But the Occupy Movement, not just on Wall Street now but everywhere, is at its core about demanding that we all have options. The option to see a doctor when sick without going broke. The option to live and work in a healthy environment. The option to afford a safe place to live. The option to get an affordable education. The option to save a little money for retirement. And the option to not live in fear that everything one has worked for might disappear. And to that I raise my pink message pad. Today it reads:

 “CALL FOR CHANGE. URGENT REPLY REQUESTED.’”

To listen to the show click here.

Latin@ Featured Poets: Francisco X. Alarcón, Eduardo C. Corral and Ruben Quesada

Francisco X. Alarcón @ Acentos

As the manuscripts for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (which will be judged by Francisco X. Alarcón) begin to trickle in to the Letras Latinas office here at Notre Dame, it is almost by serendipitous consequence that I came upon two poems featured in the current edition of the Acentos Review by Francisco X. Alarcón. I first came upon Francisco X. Alarcón’s poetry as a junior in high school. I remember in particular the joy that came with being blown away by the simplicity of language and imagery that came with the lyric flights so characteristic of his poetry. Over the years, I’ve had several encounters with Alarcón—once in 2010 at a poetry reading organized to raise funds for the victims of the Chile and Haiti earthquakes in San Francisco, California. A steadfast believer that in our times—times so characteristic of environmental, social and spiritual degradation—the writing of a poem can act as a transcendent force of prayer and cosmic renewal, Francisco X. Alarcón is a poet I keep returning to both for guidance and inspiration. Of the two poems—En invierno and La noche—my favorite is En invierno, “In Winter:”

In Winter

the branches of trees

turn into open air roots

beseeching the sky

In deceiving simplicity of language and imagery, Alarcón leads the reader beyond reason and into the realm of intuition and pure imagination (see La Noche where night becomes coffee “spilled all over the Earth’s tablecloth”), where even roots—like hands in prayer—can transcend what binds them to the ground.

*

Eduardo C. Corral @ Poetry

Eduardo C. Corral strikes again.  And this time Eduardo C. Corral has two poems “To Robert Hayden” and “To the Angelbeast” in this month’s edition of Poetry Magazine and which can be read online at the Poetry Foundation along with a beautiful thirty minute podcast and two “q&a” mini-interviews regarding his two poems.

Eduardo C. Corral writes: “I shouldn’t admit this in public, but I sometimes sleep with his [Robert Hayden’s] Collected Poems under my pillow. I want some of his greatness to seep in!" And in the two poems featured in this edition of Poetry Magazine, Eduardo has paid Hayden the ultimate tribute by making the speakers in his poems counterbalance the ambivalence present in the homoerotic poems of Robert Hayden and in the poet himself. Like the wedding ring which is “tossed” by Hayden’s imagined lover in the poem “To Robert Hayden,” Eduardo C. Corral recalls times when gay men were jailed and beaten for acting upon their desires. And in “To the Angelbeast” Corral reminds us of the emotional and physical bliss possible of same-sex relationships. I find myself lacking the words to describe what Eduardo has accomplished in these two poems; as much as this is a tribute to Hayden it is also an affirmation of Hayden’s sexuality, as Eduardo explains: “He [Hayden] believed the cancer that claimed his life was a punishment for his orientation. As an out-and-proud gay man, this saddens me…. To counter this sadness, to claim Hayden as one of my queer forefathers, I wrote a poem in which Hayden has an intimate encounter with another man. Not a stranger, but a man he already knows.… Hayden, in this poem, doesn’t fear or detest his desires. This comforts me as a gay man and as a poet who adores his work." 

Ruben Quesada @ MoondayPoetry

Of the content featured on the Letras Latinas Blog—author interviews, review roundups, etc—one of the most rewarding and pleasurable projects is that of author interviews. Currently I am reading Ruben Quesada’s collection of poems titled Next Extinct Mammal (Greenhouse Review Press, 2011). I look forward to interviewing Ruben. In the meantime, a review of Next Extinct Animal can be read here.

 “My First Sight of St. Louis,” “Cimmerian,” and “Nostalgia,” three poems from Next Extinct Animal are currently featured at Moonday Poetry. “Too much time has passed,/ and I’ve almost lost this freight/ of memories, that dawning/ of light over bluestem grass” writes Ruben in “Nostalgia.” What Ruben evokes over and over again in this collection is the ever elusive and endangered animal of memory and movement, a poet, a prophet, a collector of things past. His poems, portraits of neighborhoods and its people are poems of moving towards place and memory, toward the edges of beauty, of “the alpenglow of tomorrow and tomorrow.”