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Libros / Books
El Sol Latino May 2022
Mi’ja by MAGDALENA GÓMEZ • New York, NY | HELIOTROPE BOOKS | May 10, 2022 | 260 pages ...a time machine we are all invited to enter to reclaim the genius of our youth, an opportunity to revisit the loneliness and wonder of things we could see and under- stand only as children. At once heartbreaking and hilarious. Mi’ja chronicles the first nineteen years of the life of Magdalena Gómez—a life not meant for a child, nor is this book. It is fairytales and bestiaries in ceiling cracks; mythologies on the fire escape; realities of how the small- est acts of kindness can conquer despair. This book will reward you with revelations and celebrations of your own life; it may help you remember or perhaps even discover your truest, most honest self.
“Mesmerizing and hypnotic—I want the sequel. Can’t wait for the film.” —Naomi Jacobson, Helen Hayes award-winning actor “A fiercely honest, wickedly humorous, and immensely insightful look at the heart of a poet. Gómez dances with her ancestors, despite the stale cookies and slaps of childhood. What a harvest!” —Beverly Naidus, author of Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame “Pure poetry, pure life, pure New York City. We thrill watching the narrator survive, thrive and tell her tale. Brilliant!”—Dr. Lisa Aronson-Fontes, PhD, psychologist, professor, Fulbright Scholar, global speaker and author of Invisible Chains: Overcoming Coercive Control in Your Intimate Relationship; Child Abuse and Culture: Working with Diverse Families. About the Author MAGDALENA GÓMEZ is Poet Laureate of Springfield, MA, where she co-founded Teatro V!da, a performing arts collective; she is also an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, the author of Shameless Woman (Red Sugarcane Press) and Bullying: Replies, Rebuttals, Confessions, and Catharsis (Skyhorse, 2012), a winner of Fordham University’s 2019 Latinas 50 Plus Literature Award, the 2019 Latinx Excellence on the Hill Award from the Black and Latino Legislative Caucus of MA State House, and other arts awards. Her widely acclaimed musical play Dancing in My Cockroach Killers (2013) is a performing arts piece consisting of a collection of Gómez’s poems and monologues set to music by composer Desmar Guevara. It has been performed in Los Angeles, DC, Massachusetts, and Off-Broadway in New York City. Born to a Puerto Rican mother and Spanish Roma father, Gómez has been writing, performing and telling stories since early childhood. A devotee of Lorca, Emerson and Chinese women poets since the third grade, this eclectic thinker is at once fierce and tender, one who creates a mystical bond with every audience.
Julia de Burgos:La creación de un ícono puertorriqueño por VANESSA PÉREZ-ROSARIO Traducido por Isabel Zapata, en colaboración con la autora Champaign, IL | UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS | Abril 12, 2022 | 208 páginas Durante más de cincuenta años, Julia de Burgos ha evocado sentimientos de identidad y unión entre puertorriqueños y latinxs en Estados Unidos. Vanessa Pérez-Rosario va más allá del enfoque trágico de otras biografías de Burgos para examinar la vida de la artista considerando el trasfondo de la cultura puertorriqueña y la compleja historia de la isla y la diáspora. Enfocándose en Burgos como escritora y activista, Pérez-Rosario profundiza en su desarrollo artístico, su experiencia como migrante, sus luchas contra el colonialismo y la injusticia social y sus contribuciones a la cultura literaria y visual latinoamericanas. Al mismo tiempo, desentraña las dinámicas culturales y políticas que operan en las revisiones y reinvenciones de Burgos que escritores y artistas latinxs contemporáneos en Nueva York llevan a cabo para imaginar nuevas posibilidades para sí mismos y sus comunidades. Disponible por primera vez en español, Julia de Burgos cuenta la destacada historia de la poeta y activista puertorriqueña. VANESSA PÉREZ-ROSARIO es traductora profesora de Inglés en Queens College, y profesora de Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures en el Graduate Center, CUNY. Es la autora de Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon (2014) publicado en español bajo el título Julia de Burgos: la creación de un ícono puertorriqueño (2022).
Editó Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement (Palgrave 2010) y tradujo Boat People de Mayra Santos-Febres (Cardboard House Press 2021). Esla editora de Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. Pérez-Rosario ha recibido reconocimientos de las fundaciones Woodrow Wilson y Mellon, del American Association of University Women, y del David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies en Harvard University. Ella es parte del Advisory Board of Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project en el University of Houston, y por cuatro años ha servido como Associate Investigator, incluyendo un año como Interim-Principal Investigator en el CUNY-New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals at The Graduate Center-CUNY, donde actualmente sirve en la capadidad de consultora.
