Author's Statement

As a Latina poet from the California/Mexico border, I speak for the women I grew up with: the mothers, daughters, childless women, aunties, and nanas who have become my voice, my poetry, concerned with the complex relationships many Latina women have with family—both a liberating and subjugating force, buttressing and repressive, mythical and real. My own family has long supported my poetry. This fellowship means I can now afford childcare and take on fewer classes as an adjunct professor and devote more time to writing without sacrificing time away from home. 

This fellowship will allow me to finish my manuscript Karaoke Night at the Asylum, which illuminates the life of a woman who relives her childhood in the Southwestern desert with a mentally ill mother, an alcoholic scientist father, and a suicidal brother, and who now struggles with mental illness as she raises her own children. In addition, the fellowship will also allow me to continue my next manuscript Aunt Lucy Packs a Suitcase, in which I re-conceive the roles of women of color as assigned by the cultures of their ancestors and their homeland, the United States. Speaking from the liminal societal space inhabited by many African-American, Mexican-American, and Native-American women, my poems deconstruct nursery rhymes, songs and chants, and often focus on repetition as a vehicle to describe the nature of loss.

Receiving the fellowship reminds me to continue sending my art out into the world, to keep writing my distinct interpretation of the lives of so many men and women, and that, yes, there is an audience for my work. I'm so thankful not only for the financial help but for the emotional and psychological encouragement this award gives me.