Las Comadres is a 25-year-old national organization that brings Latinas
together through email, teleconferences, and in person to engage in dialogues
around culture and other aspects of life. They have a national series of teleconferences
in which their members all around the nation discuss books they've read with
their authors--Las Comadres Conversations With...
And Every
Last Secret has been selected for one of these conversations in May!
This is a real honor, and I’m very
excited. This is a great organization that's doing such
essential work in many ways, but especially promoting reading and literature
this way. So I’m really looking forward to my teleconference with these
bright, inquiring Latina minds!
Right now, I’m getting ready to head
to the Associated Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) national conference for a
crazy, hectic week. I’ll be co-hosting the Ragdale reception on Thursday
evening at the Cliff Dwellers, and I hope to read at the Guild Complex/Tia Chucha
Press reading afterward—if I’m not too physically worn out by then. Then, on
Friday night, I will read with the Latino Writers Collective and Proyecto Latina at Columbia College Chicago in
one of the off-site readings. With our great Chicago friends, the damas of
Proyecto Latina, we hope to put a distinctive Midwestern spin on this national
celebration of the written word.
I will also be on a panel with
fellow Latino Writers Collective members on Saturday from 3:00-4:15 pm that
will discuss our experiences with offering writing workshops to the children of
migrant farm workers. This has been such a fruitful and satisfying project for
the Collective, and the feedback says that we’ve really made a change in these
young people’s lives. We’ll talk about how we started and how other groups could
do something similar in their areas.
I will be
working at the Tia Chucha Press/Scapegoat Press table (B12, like the vitamin) in
the bookfair much of the time I’m at the conference. I’ll have ARCs of Every Last Secret with its gorgeous
cover top show off to any of my friends who visit me.
I hope everyone
will also check out the dynamite new book I edited—Woven Voices: 3 Generations of Puertorriqueñas
Look at their American Lives. This book braids a conversation of poetry
among three very different but truly related poets, Anita Velez-Mitchell,
grandmother and mother, Gloria Vando, mother and daughter, and Anika Paris,
daughter and granddaughter.
Ruth Behar,
author of An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba says, “Woven Voices is like
no other poetry book! Here is a gorgeous trio of poets, a grandmother,
daughter, and granddaughter who share family ties, a common Puerto Rican
history, and the twists and turns of a diasporic journey. Each speaking in her
own unique voice, Anita, Gloria, and Anika write with honesty and tenderness
about the big themes of home and mortality as well as about everyday lessons
and losses. Read the poems together and separately and you'll find yourself
singing along, entering a world of beauty and truth you didn't know existed.”
On Thursday
here in the Literary Mystery Novelists series, you can read an interview with
Rhys Bowen, author of two current mystery series plus an earlier one that have
won many awards. An extra bonus if you’re jones-ing for a Downton Abbey fix—one
series is set in that time period among Britain’s aristocracy.
Then, on Monday, we’ll return to the
Books of Interest by Writers of Color series, and midweek I’ll try to post
another installment of the series on Juggling the Two Jobs of Writing Novels
and Promoting Books.
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