A Reading List for Hispanic Heritage Month 2024


For National Hispanic Heritage Month, observed annually from September 15 to October 15, we asked our members to share with us some of the literature they recommend reading in celebration. (Learn more about National Hispanic Heritage Month here.)

 

Drama, Hybrid & Nonfiction

 

The Hurricane Book: A Lyric History by Claudia Acevedo-Quinones featuring a pattern of light blue wavy lines against a dark blue background.The Hurricane Book: A Lyric Essay by Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones

Rose Metal Press | 2023

In her debut, Acevedo-Quiñones “pieces together the story of her family and Puerto Rico using a captivating combination of historical facts, poems, maps, overheard conversations, and flash essays.”

 

 

 

Micrograms by Jorge Carrera Andrade

Translated from the Spanish by Alejandro de Acosta and Joshua Beckman

Wave Books | 2011

A book “equal parts essay, anthology, and poetry,” Micrograms illustrates Carrera Andrade’s “claim that the impulse toward the microgram has always existed” and “points to the richness of possibility contained therein.”

 

 

 

Cover of 404 Not Found by Lucas Baisch, featuring the text in a circle against a painterly sepia background.404 Not Found by Lucas Baisch

53rd State Press | 2024

Baisch’s play is “a twisting, twisted work of intricacy, density, and despair netted in kidnap, virtual utopias, upended borders, and Freddy Krueger cosplay.”

 

 

 

Lost Cities Go to Paradise / Las Ciudades Perdidas Van al Paraíso by Alicia Borinsky

Translated from the Spanish by Regina Galasso with Alicia Borinsky

Swan Isle Press | 2015

This collection of poetry and short fiction “mixes deceit and conceit with moments of tenderness and the elusive nature of humanity, asking if identity is more than a festival of masks and self-invention.”

 

 

Eating Moors and Christians by Sandra M. Castillo

CavanKerry Press | 2016

This memoir “utilizes the Cuban Revolution as a springboard from which to discuss what is at the center of exile literature—liminality.”

 

 

 

Cover of Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn't My Rapist by Cecilia Gentili, featuring half a red flower on a black background.Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn’t My Rapist by Cecilia Gentili

LittlePuss Press | 2023

This book is “a rich and moving epistolary memoir about transgender childhood, sexual trauma, motherhood, and a young queer life in 1970s Argentina.”

 

 

 

The Javier Plays by Carlos Murillo featuring surreal black and white line art of a cow-like figure drinking from a tank.The Javier Plays by Carlos Murillo

53rd State Press | 2016

According to Todd London, these five essays and three plays “fold and unfold like America itself—its violence, its identity crises, its homegrown art, its shape in the eye of the immigrant.”

 

 

 

Los Cedros: A Tejana Memoir by Dorotea Reyna

Flowersong Press | 2024

In her memoir, Reyna “attempts to recover the wholeness she felt as a child from the violence and demagoguery of today’s political discourse.”

 

 

 

Spit and Passion by Cristy C. Road

Feminist Press | 2012

This graphic memoir is about “the transformative moment when music crashes into a stifling adolescent bedroom and saves you.”

 

 

 

Cover of Watcha by Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal, featuring a photo of an art installation made up of two green figures cut in half where the torsos meet the legs.Watcha by Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal

Deep Vellum | 2024

Through “free verse, personal photographs, and prosaic gestures,” this collection charts “a vast terrain that ranges from an artistic standpoint, to border crossing, to belonging, to portraiture, to self-portraiture, to abstraction, to death, to a call for action.”

 

 

 

Fiction

 

Spirits of the Ordinary, A Tale of Casas Grandes by Kathleen Alcalá

Raven Chronicles Press | 2021

Originally published in 1997, the new edition of this award-winning novel “weaves the stories of women struggling against societal constraints, Mexican Jews practicing their religion in secret, and a gold prospector turned spiritual seeker in a spectacular desert landscape.”

 

 

 

The Flower in the Skull by Kathleen Alcalá

Raven Chronicles Press | 2023

The second edition of a novel spanning 130 years, The Flower in the Skull “opens in the 1870s with Concha, an Ópata Indian woman who has fled to Tucson, where she works as a housekeeper and clings to memories of her old way of life.”

 

 

 

Cover of American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas, featuring an illustration of a green labyrinth with many figures walking through it.American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas

Dalkey Archive Press | 2024

Cárdenas’s novel “unfurls into a layered, poignant, and unflinching portrait of how family separations have impacted the minds of Latin American deportees in a technology-bound 21st century.”

 

 

 

Cover of Cómo no ahogarse en un vaso de agua by Angie Cruz, featuring a line drawing of a woman with blue lipstick and a blue sleeve on a yellow background.Cómo no ahogarse en un vaso de agua by Angie Cruz

Translated to the Spanish by Kianny N. Antigua

Seven Stories Press | 2024

Cruz’s novel, presented here in a Spanish-language edition, follows “a woman who has lost everything but the chance to finally tell her story.”

 

 

 

Throw by Rubén Degollado featuring the hooded face of a woman, one-half of her face painted with skull mexican makeup, floating above a photograph of a man standing next to his car in the road.Throw by Rubén Degollado

Slant Books | 2019

In this YA novel, “Llorona is the only girl Güero has ever loved. A wounded soul, she has adopted the name of a ghost from Mexican folklore.”

 

 

 

Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas by Fernando A. Flores

Host Publications | 2018

This is a collection of “ten punk rock fairy-tales about artists and misfits trying to make noise and live forever in the unforgiving landscape of the Rio Grande Valley.”

 

 

 

I’m Not Hungry But I Could Eat by Christopher Gonzalez

Santa Fe Writers Project | 2021

According to Ruth Joffre, this short fiction collection “captures all the messy joys and crackling anxieties of modern queer life, inviting readers to join its Puerto Rican characters on journeys punctuated by desire, shame, and grace.”

 

 

 

Mona At Sea by Elizabeth Gonzalez James

Santa Fe Writers Project | 2021

Gonzalez James’s novel tells the story of Mona Mireles, who “faces down unemployment, underemployment, the complexities of adult relationships, and the downward spiral of her parents’ shattering marriage.”

 

 

 

Cover of Captain Chicano Draws a Line in the American Sand, featuring a woodblock-print-style, black-and-white illustration of a man in a cape standing on a bus or streetcar.Captain Chicano Draws a Line in the American Sand by Stephen D. Gutierrez

University of Tampa Press | 2024

In this novella, “Captain Chicano is out to save the country! White supremacy is on the rise and he is the only one capable of beating it with a secret weapon. Love. But will it work?”

 

 

 

I’ll Give You a Reason by Annell López

Feminist Press | 2024

The characters in these stories “tread the waters of political unrest, sexuality, religion, body image, Blackness, colorism, and gentrification—searching for their identities and a sliver of joy and intimacy.”

 

 

 

Clay by Frank Meola

Green Writers Press | 2020

Set on Staten Island in the 1970s, Meola’s novel centers “the life of a boy confronting changes in his family, his community, and himself at a time of social confusion and turmoil.”

 

 

 

The Ballad of Gato Guerrero by Manuel Ramos

Arte Público Press | 2024

Originally published in 1994, this second installment in the Luis Montez Mystery series “takes readers on a wild ride through Denver’s mean streets and deadly encounters with young gangbangers.”

 

 

 

Urban Folk Tales by Y. Rodriguez featuring a black and white photograph of a person riding a bike into the golden sunlight surrounded by the city.Urban Folk Tales by Y. Rodriguez

Read Furiously | 2023

These short stories explore “the miraculous and the mundane scenes that play up and down the avenues of New York City, giving meaning to our lives.”

 

 

 

 

Litany of Saints: A Triptych by Diana Rojas

Arte Público Press | 2024

In this debut collection, “Rojas’ characters grapple with their self-perception as they consider what they’re supposed to be and who they want to be.”

 

 

 

Secret Memories / Recuerdos secretos by Carlos Rubio

Gival Press | 2005

According to Hope Maxell Snyder, in this bilingual novel “the reader feels pulled into the narrator’s world and observes, along with him, a delicate, beautiful and vulnerable universe as personal and intimate as a conversation between lovers.”

 

 

 

Rain Revolutions by Bessie Flores Zaldívar

Long Day Press | 2021

According to Matthew Salesses, in these three stories Flores Zaldívar “connects the dots between individual characters and the failures of the systems that define the parameters of their agency.”

 

 

 

Poetry

 

Dream of Xibalba by Stephanie Adams-Santos

Orison Books | 2023

According to Rebecca Morgan Frank, this collection “maps an uncanny journey into a watery Mayan underworld populated with ancestors and scented by the ‘perfume of the underworld.’”

 

 

 

Sonnets from the Puerto Rican by Jack Agüeros

Hanging Loose Press | 1996

According to Lorna Dee Cervantes, in this collection Agüeros “extends the range of poetic possibility in these stunning sonnets from real life.”

 

 

 

MyOTHER TONGUE by Rosa Alcalá

Futurepoem | 2017

In this collection, Alcalá “uses empty spaces, hesitations and semantic difficulties to address mothers and daughters, herself as mother and herself as daughter, and the messy emotions and miscommunications that move between languages.”

 

 

 

An Empty Pot’s Darkness by José Angel Araguz

Airlie Press | 2019

According to Vincent Cooper, Araguz’s fourth full-length poetry collection “brings stunning moments of beauty to notions of what if, death, the moon, and lost relationships.”

 

 

 

Prayers of Little Consequence by Gilbert Arzola

Passager | 2020

Arzola invites us into his story “with poems about growing up poor and Mexican in an all-white neighborhood as well as poems about family, the self, and people in his life he has lost.”

 

 

 

Now in Color by Jacqueline Balderrama featuring a black and white photograph of four people with the women saturated in different colors and a red torn piece of paper featuring the titleNow in Color by Jacqueline Balderrama

Perugia Press | 2020

Balderrama’s debut poetry collection “explores the multigenerational immigrant experience of Mexican-Americans who have escaped violence, faced pressures to assimilate, and now seek to reconnect to a fragmented past.”

 

 

 

Hívado by Andrew E. Colarusso

Flood Editions | 2022

This debut collection shows us “vivid glimpses of a life spent between Puerto Rico and New York: a moment undressing beside a tarn in the rural barrio of Limaní, the loneliness of buses and taxis, dead bees in the corner of an apartment in Brooklyn.”

 

 

 

Copy by Dolores Dorantes featuring a plain cream-white background with the title in typerwriter font.Copy by Dolores Dorantes

Translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers

Wave Books | 2022

Copy is “a prose poem sequence that insinuates an experience of violent removal: a person’s disappearance from a country, from normal life, and forcible reintegration into a new social and existential configuration.”

 

 

 

Tourist by TAK Erzinger

Sea Crow Press | 2023

According to Madeleine F. White, this collection—shortlisted for the 2023 Eyelands Book Award in poetry—explores the search for identity, “surrendering to what cannot be changed and confronting the mercurial temperament of relationships.”

 

 

 

Cover of I Don't Want to Be Understood featuring a photograph of a stool made of a pink organic-looking material.I Don’t Want to Be Understood by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

Alice James Books | 2024

According to Donika Kelly, Espinoza’s fourth collection “charts the cosmology of a woman come into herself in a world of violence, a world that would undo the wonder of this speaker.”

 

 

 

Learning to Love a Western Sky by Amelia Díaz Ettinger

Airlie Press | 2020

Díaz Ettinger’s collection is “a reflection of the assimilation of the immigrant into the host landscape.”

 

 

 

These Hollowed Bones by Amelia Díaz Ettinger

Sea Crow Press | 2024

The voices in these poems “speak of the isolation felt by both avian and human due to migration and loss of habitat, loss of home.”

 

 

 

All the Places We Love Have Been Left in Ruins / Todos Los Sitios Que Amamos Han Quedado en Ruinas by Ariel Francisco

Burrow Press | 2024

Francisco “mourns a Miami already ruined by climate change and development, and meditates on the future ruins of a city reclaimed by the sea.”

 

 

 

Pentimento by Joshua Garcia

Black Lawrence Press | 2024

“Using modes of confession, ekphrasis, and biblical persona,” Garcia’s debut collection “excavates a queerness entangled in one’s faith tradition.”

 

 

 

Dirt and Honey by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland

Green Writers Press | 2018

This collection is a place where “ancient lineages are drawn with breast milk, seduction begins with feasts of peppers, and ‘fisherchildren’ displaced by wars are always welcomed into new lands.”

 

 

 

Arsenal with Praise Song by Rodney Gómez

Orison Books | 2021

These poems “scrutinize human bodies and the body of the earth as the sites of great injustices and violences—political, social, and spiritual.”

 

 

 

House by Mariela Griffor

Mayapple Press | 2007

This collection makes real “the struggles of war, becoming an expatriate and the alienation that accompanies the immersion in a new culture.”

 

 

 

Mother Is a Body by Brandi Katherine Herrera

Fonograf Editions | 2021

This book-length poem “renounces and reveres the notion of the sacred feminine, to illustrate ‘mother’ in her many actualities—a complex figure, at times unsightly, that both is and isn’t what we most often ascribe to her.”

 

 

 

Bloomer by Jessica Hincapie

Trio House Press | 2022

Hincapie’s poems “pull us into a hazardous and tropical swampland of a speaker consistently confronted by the violence and wonderment of being alive.”

 

 

 

The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani featuring a red background and a drawing of woman and her baby sketched on the page of a book; rips of orange paper surround the baby’s head while black ink stains the mother.The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani

Perugia Press | 2023

Hotchandani’s debut poetry collection “is a study in shifting cultural and personal identities as well as in belonging—to our bodies, our memories, our stories, ourselves, our families, our cultures.”

 

 

 

We Borrowed Gentleness by J. Estanislao Lopez

Alice James Books | 2022

According to Vanessa Angélica Villareal, Lopez’s book “shows us how power is terrifying to hold, how tender a child’s world is, how vulnerable one must be to take the lessons of history, to ‘converse with Time.’”

 

 

 

Nerve Curriculum by Manuel Paul López

Futurepoem | 2023

Sawako Nakayasu calls this hybrid collection “a punk playbook for survival with such deep, ferocious love for the world and its inhabitants.”

 

 

 

Architects of the Imaginary / Los arquitectos del imaginario by Marta López-Luaces featuring a black cover bordering a golden and colorful abstract piece of art.Architects of the Imaginary / Los arquitectos del imaginario by Marta López-Luaces

Translated from the Spanish by G. J. Racz

Gival Press | 2022

According to Peter Gizzi, in this bilingual poetry collection “the world and its phenomena are respected, named, and given their proper occupation.”

 

 

 

Shadow in Silver / Sombra en Plata by Olivia Maciel

Translated from the Spanish by Kelly Austin

Swan Isle Press | 2005

The poems in Maciel’s fourth collection are “catalysts for transformation, challenging the reader with a vision of a world where myth and the quotidian are intimately intertwined.”

 

 

 

The Glue Trap by Julio Marzán

Fernwood Press | 2023

According to Martín Espada, these poems “spring from a deep well of compassion, nowhere better illustrated than by the title poem about a mouse that meets a miserable fate at the hands of the poet, who cannot bear the suffering he has inflicted.”

 

 

 

Sea of Broken Mirrors by Pablo Medina

Hanging Loose Press | 2024

Medina’s new poems “explore how the diminishment of self (indeed, its ultimate disappearance) can be a way of engaging with the world.”

 

 

 

Receta by Mario José Pagán Morales

great weather for MEDIA | 2022

According to Violeta Orozco, this book “chronicles the lives of jíbaros in the island and títeres in the mainland, the hood savants of Nueva Yol, those equipped to survive the daily hustle in the city of dreams deferred en Español y en Spanglish.”

 

 

 

A Ten Peso Burial for Which Truth I Sign by Gabriel Palacios

Fonograf Editions | 2024

In his debut collection, Palacios “reckons with the cultural heritage of the Southwest border region by sifting through its detritus.”

 

 

 

 

Poemas Callejeros / Streetwise Poems by Johanny Vázquez Paz

Mayapple Press | 2007

These poems explore “one of the many strands of contemporary Latino immigrant experience, dancing the tropical sensibility of Puerto Rico among Chicago’s concrete and broken glass.”

 

 

 

Gemini Gospel by Bianca Alyssa Pérez

Host Publications | 2023

In these poems, “the inherited self is entwined with the one that is discovered, loss is braided with luminous love, and no matter how deep grief runs, it brings us always back to tenderness.”

 

 

 

All Women Are Born Wailing by Nen G Ramirez

Nomadic Press & Black Lawrence Press | 2023

In this collection, Ramirez “challenges the ‘crazy Latina’ stereotype and examines the ways it has been used to belittle and dehumanize people who deserve treatment and care.”

 

 

 

Cells by Lucianna Chixaro Ramos

Burrow Press | 2023

This collection of verse and visual poetry “explores how language acts as imperfect material for building not only poems, but also laws and institutions.”

 

 

 

The Blue Mimes by Sara Daniele Rivera

Graywolf Press | 2024

Rivera’s debut is “a collection of sprawling elegy in the face of catastrophic grief, both personal and public.”

 

 

 

The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez by Iliana Rocha featuring a white cover with a black print of figures carrying a coffin.The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez by Iliana Rocha

Tupelo Press | 2022

This collection “chronicles an obsession with the 1971 unsolved murder of Rocha’s grandfather while interrogating the true crime genre, tabloid culture, immigrant identity, the phenomena of missing and murdered women, troubled relationships with law enforcement, and the intersection of prose and poetry.”

 

 

 

Study of the Raft by Leonora Simonovis featuring a cover split down the middle, the left half a turquoise sea, the right side the wooden boards of a plank.Study of the Raft by Leonora Simonovis

Colorado Review/Center for Literary Publishing | 2021

Simonovis’s poems “weave the outer world of a failed political revolution in her native country, Venezuela, with an inner journey into the memories of migration and exile, of a home long gone, and of family relations.”

 

 

 

The City She Was by Carmen Giménez Smith

Colorado Review/Center for Literary Publishing | 2011

According to Thomas Sayers Ellis, this collection “reroutes the architecture of experience so effectively that the reader is awarded a new unnamed sense, a soft power, one that reprioritizes our outdated reality.”

 

 

 

In Inheritance of Drowning by Dorsía Smith Silva

CavanKerry Press | 2024

Smith Silva’s debut collection “confronts the ‘drowning’ of BIPOC communities as they are displaced, exploited, and robbed of their identities and witnesses their resistance and resilience.”

 

 

 

Sweet Beast by Gabriella R. Tallmadge featuring a rust-colored cover with a tarot-card style; two white-tailed animals circle each other in the center of a sun.Sweet Beast by Gabriella R. Tallmadge

Trio House Press | 2021

This collection “strips away our soft exteriors and exposes the feral desires which escape from their cages when facing the possibility of death.”

 

 

 

Against the Regime of the Fluent by Natasha Tiniacos

Translated from the Spanish by Rebeca Alderete Baca

Ugly Duckling Presse | 2024

The poems in this collection are “fragments that dream of becoming ruins of a present still unfolding against the systems of power, (the) body, language or all the systems.”

 

 

 

Literary Magazines

 

Three Poems by Rosa Alcalá

The Hopkins Review | 2024

The poem “While Your Fathers Did Second Shifts” begins, “Because your fathers fled a dictatorship only to set up their own, / and took with them the belief that a woman shouldn’t enter a bar / unless…”

 

 

 

“Why Don’t You Write About Joy?” by Yael Valencia Aldana

West Trestle Review | 2024

This poem begins, “Why do you keep writing about all this brown girl suffering? / Because when my mother was last pregnant, fate bathed her in blood…”

 

 

 

Logo of Full Stop: Reviews, Interviews, MarginaliaReview of Jaime Cortez’s Gordo by Allysson Casais

Full Stop | 2022

This review begins, “Watching Jaime Cortez read aloud an excerpt from his debut short-story collection Gordo, published by Grove Atlantic Press earlier this year, is a pleasure.”

 

 

 

“Noir Story” by Joy Castro

SmokeLong Quarterly | 2023

This story begins, “It started like any other dumb relationship. No particular red flags. • I’m reading this book on Afro-pessimism, he said. A white guy.”

 

 

 

“We’re Running Through the Sprinklers Again” by Michaela Chairez

Exposition Review | 2024

This flash piece begins, “We’re running through the sprinklers saying we should run through the sprinklers again. Saying we’re best friends forever.”

 

 

 

Logo of The Cincinnati Review featuring "The" and "Review" in black and "Cincinnati" in white on a red square.Three Poems by Jose Hernandez Diaz

The Cincinnati Review | 2023

The poem “The Coyote Who Was Once a Dragon” begins, “A rugged coyote wandered close by the oceanside communities. Tired, it sat beneath a palm tree and took a / nap.”

 

 

 

“Mother Love” by Tinna Flores

Exposition Review | 2024

This short story begins, “Suzie is lying sideways on the gray love seat so that her legs dangle over the armrest. She’s a thin girl, all knees and elbows and long, thick dark hair.”

 

 

 

Latinx Poetry Month

South Florida Poetry Journal | 2024

This special edition features forty Latinx poets including Yael Valencia Aldana, LC Gutierrez, Angela Narciso Torres, and more.

 

 

 

“All You Need Is Love” by Luis Lopez-Maldonado

phoebe | 2023

This poem begins, “I am made of water Soy agua fresca agua caliente ardiente agua that feeds the dry / dry deserts, floods the pebbled roads in Michoacán Mejico…”

 

 

 

To the Man Who Killed My Poem” by Rolando André López

Off Assignment | 2022

This essay begins, “We meet on a rainy evening in early March. Earlier that week, I had been lying in Dolores Park listening to a John Lennon song, and I thought of Kahlil Gibran…”

 

 

 

“To the Cruise Ship Dancer” by Sara Luzuriaga

Off Assignment | 2023

This essay begins, “I spotted you walking past our table. You were with a friend, both holding graffitied skateboards and wearing cuffed pants and Vans.”

 

 

 

“Golden” by Rita Maria Martinez

West Trestle Review | 2024

This poem begins, “Summer after neurostimulator surgery life / is golden. Imitrex injections expire unused. / The Doc praises…”

 

 

 

Logo of ANMLY with the text in black inside a twisted mobius shape colored in with multicolored patches, against a pale purple background.“The Sea, the Shell, & the Pearl: Through Embodiment to Poetry” by Jael Montellano

ANMLY | 2023

This essay begins, “This essay is a treatment. It tracks the predominant physiological responses of your traumatized past, the way your body remembers, the way your therapist guides you to presence, and the way presence unlocks a treasure house of language.”

 

 

 

“Parked Car Prayer” by Jaclyn Navar

Wellspringwords | 2024

This poem begins, “I grew up in funeral homes. I know my eulogy will not be about me but what others think. My family won’t know who / to call.”

 

 

 

“Study in Pink” by Jaclyn Navar

Wellspringwords | 2024

This poem begins, “It’s not called baby pink. For a quinceanera dress, it’s called champagne. / It will finally be thrown out in a pandemic.”

 

 

 

Two Poems by Antonio Ochoa

Harvard Review | 2024

The first of these two poems begins, “The bull tilts its head until the garlands that hang from its horns touch the street’s / pavement, paying attention to the finches singing…”

 

 

 

“Detour in the Canopy” by María Ospina

Translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary

Adi Magazine | 2023

This novel excerpt begins, “The journey is southward and also ascending. Accompanying the jungle as it climbs the first buds of the cordillera. Rising along the impatient layers from deep in the earth…”

 

 

 

“in the belly of a whale” by jj peña

SmokeLong Quarterly | 2023

This story begins, “we live in salt now, you say, & then lick my cheek. once, twice, three times doggish.”

 

 

 

Five Poems by Irma Pineda

Translated from the Diidxazá (Isthmus Zapotec) and the Spanish by Wendy Call

Adi Magazine | 2020

The first of these five poems begins, “I clawed a path underground / with my fingernails, no light, no air / The only thing that kept me alive / was the hope of seeing you…”

 

 

 

Logo of ANMLY with the text in black inside a twisted mobius shape colored in with multicolored patches, against a pale purple background.Puerto Rico en mi Corazon

ANMLY | 2019

This anthology features “45 contemporary Puerto Rican poets, both emerging and established, writing in both English and Spanish, living both on la isla and in the diaspora, afro-boricua, white, mixed, indigenx, and of all genders.”

 

 

 

Logo of Full Stop: Reviews, Interviews, MarginaliaReview of Fernando Vallejo’s The Abyss by Bruno Franco

Full Stop | 2024

This review begins, “Fernando Vallejo’s novel The Abyss, newly translated into English by Yvette Siegert, opens with the Colombian writer returning to his native country after a long voluntary exile.”

 

 

 

“An Intergenerational Journey Through Food Insecurity” by Nilsa Ada Rivera

Tahoma Literary Review | 2024

This essay begins, “Tuesday morning. I’m at Publix Supermarket. The self-checkout register has asked for an amount I do not have. My heart sinks into my solar plexus.”

 

 

 

Logo of The Cincinnati Review featuring "The" and "Review" in black and "Cincinnati" in white on a red square.“Aloes” by Edward Sambrano III

The Cincinnati Review | 2024

This poem begins, “We are sitting on the porch, staring / At our respective screens, pixels / Constructing disparate scenes / In our cortices.”

 

 

 

“Skin Tones” by Cordelia Scoville

Polyphony Lit | 2024

This piece begins, “My grandmother’s features look as if they might lift from her any moment, on a gust of wind or / up to the sky, evaporating under an orange sun.”

 

 

 

“Vuelve a Casa” by Zanna Vasquez

Polyphony Lit | 2024

This piece begins, “I didn’t know why I was here. It was the war I wanted to flee to, not an old house in the slums. I wanted to be a pilot. Or a nurse. Anything to get away from my life.”

 

 

 

“Today I Bought La Casa de Bernarda Alba” by Brendon Villalobos

The Hopkins Review | 2024

This short story begins, “My husband told me he was going to kill himself, and then he did.”

 

 

 

Logo of ANMLY with the text in black inside a twisted mobius shape colored in with multicolored patches, against a pale purple background.“Sunlight” by Keagan Wheat

ANMLY | 2023

This poem begins, “and cheeseburgers; glinting / red car. I only recently / learned your wrong pro- / nunciation. An idol / of a group I thought excluded / me.”

 

 

 

Writing & Art from the Farmworker Community

The Common | 2024

This portfolio features fiction by Helena María Viramontes, nonfiction by Nora Rodriguez Camagna, poetry by Miguel M. Morales, and more.