Category: Podcast
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The Exiled Poet: Guisell Gomez
While I was at the Associated Writing Programs conference in Florida this past month, I met Guisell Gomez, a student of creative writing and a published poet. Born in Colombia, she and her family moved to the United States when she was a child. She remembers the move, the brutal act of being torn out…
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Art and Madness
There are studies on the connection between the artistic impulse and mental illness. The best are books written by Kay Redfield Jamison, especially her “Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.” In that book, she charts hundreds of writers, from George Gordon Lord Byron to Virginia Woolf, and reveals how the mental illness…
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Francisco Aragón: Literary Activist
Poet Francisco Aragón is doing is doing more for U.S. Latinx literature than any person I know. While writing his own work, he’s also always pushing and promoting the literary works of others, namely, the new Latinx writers on the block. He’s the son of Nicaraguan immigrants, born and raised in San Francisco, CA. He…
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Poet Alexandra Regalado: Life Seen Through the Bulletproof Glass
When I attended the Associated Writing Programs conference in Tampa, Florida in March, I sought out Latinos, because the last time I went to the conference, about ten years ago, AWP truly deserved the nickname that people of color gave it: “All White People.” It’s still a majority white, but I found the Latina/o/x writers…
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El Testimonio: César Vallejo y la búsqueda de mis raíces
Every once in a while I do a podcast in Spanish, and talk about what it means to be Latino today, in the U.S. Porque, para mí, el español siempre fue, y es, el idioma de amor–ese amor de la niñez, cuando las mujeres de la casa en mi pueblo natal, San Francisco, CA–las tías,…