Letras Latinas Blog

All too often intelligent people dimiss the need for diversity as a mere political correctness, as though it were a style or a fashion. But we are shapers of culture, and we are educating those who will be defining and contributing to our national sensibility and ethos for decades to come. I think it’s high time the creative writing world got serious about its cultural responsibility to reflect the nation it’s a part of.

—Mark Doty

The Writer’s Chronicle, September, 2011

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To you my antonym

my gimel from whose

gray arena a man’s body

Emerges   m   in aftertaste

and edges at the back

of his throat   tongue

sliding between teeth

and gums into daughter-

less corners   His father

plummets: heroic

song thru a wind-

tunnel,   booze + lubricants

choke-chain tighter

his footsteps rising

from my mouth

—Roberto Tejada

from Exposition Park (Wesleyan University Press, 2010)

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My work is compelled, too, by a need to broaden the potential readerships with which contemporary poetry can interact, insofar as I see poetry as a primary location for emerging predicaments of global citizenship, translational relations, including those of Latin America and the United States, Latino~a identity, and the political emotions of sexual difference.

—Roberto Tejada

from “Argument” (page 3)

Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal of Poetics(Issue 9: September 2011)

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Cullity: If you had one thing—only one thing—that you wanted to get across to apprentice writers, what might it be?

Burroway: This: Right now—whether you’re in writing courses getting “paid” in credit for writing, or burdened and distracted by earning a living and changing diapers—figure out how to make writing an integral part of your life. Publication is good and gives you courage to go on, but publication is not as important as the act of writing. And never let anyone tell you that what you’re doing is worthless or selfish. Writing is a way of trying to be honest to yourself…

The Writer’s Chronicle, September, 2011