Episode #131: Erin Entrada Kelly, author of LALANI AND THE DISTANT SEA

 

Erin Entrada Kelly. Photo by Laurence Kesterson.

New York Times–bestselling author Erin Entrada Kelly was awarded the Newbery Medal for Hello, Universe.  Her debut novel, Blackbird Fly, was a Kirkus Best Book, a School Library Journal Best Book, an ALSC Notable Book, and an Asian/Pacific American Literature Honor Book. She is also the author of The Land of Forgotten Girls, winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and You Go First, a New York Times bestseller, Spring 2018 Indie Next Pick, Kirkus Reviews Best Book, and School Library Journal Best Book.  Her book, Lalani and the Distant Sea, was released in September 2019.  She grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and now lives in Delaware. http://www.erinentradakelly.com

 

Rachelle Cruz with Erin Entrada Kelly

 

Episode #126: Las Peregrinas

Las Peregrinas was an idea first birthed by Yaccaira Salvatierra and co-organized with Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo. They wanted California women’s voices to be in conversation with other border states and communities as a way to share and heal. Each of the four peregrinas honors her antepasados and the border in her poetry and together they share a reverence for those who have gone before them.

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, a first-generation Chicana, is the author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications 2016). A former Steinbeck Fellow, Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grantee, she’s received residencies from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, National Parks Arts Foundation and Poetry Foundation. Her work is published in Acentos Review, CALYX, crazyhorse, and American Poetry Review among others. A dramatization of her poem “Our Lady of the Water Gallons,” directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño, can be viewed at latinopia.com. She is a cofounder of Women Who Submit and a member of Macondo Writers’ Workshop.

Marisol Baca is the author of Tremor (Three Mile Harbor Press). She has been published in Narrative Northeast, Riverlit, Shadowed: An Anthology of Women Writers, Acentos Review, among other publications. Marisol won the Andres Montoya poetry scholarship prize. She received her Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University where she won the Robert Chasen poetry award for her poem, Revelato. Currently, Marisol is an English professor at Fresno City College.

Yaccaira Salvatierra’s poems have appeared in Huizache, Diálogo, Puerto del Sol, and Rattleamong others. She is a VONA alumna, the recipient of the Dorrit Sibley Award for achievement in poetry, and the 2015 winner of the Puerto del Sol Poetry Prize.  She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net.  An educator and art instructor, she lives in San José, California with her two sons.

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley borderlands to formerly undocumented Mexican immigrants. Her work has recently appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day feature, Buzzfeed Reader, Pinwheel, Epiphany, Southern Indiana Review, Apogee, Poor Claudia, PBS Newshour and elsewhere. She is the author of the collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series, 2017) and is currently pursuing her doctorate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is raising her son with the help of a loyal dog.

Interview with Melissa de la Cruz, author of Something in Between

Our first video interview with Melissa de la Cruz, author of Something in Between, with guest co-host, Cherisse Nadal!

 

A little bit about Something in Between:

With her gusty and poignant new novel, Something in Between, #1 New York Times bestselling author Melissa de la Cruz tackles a subject close to her heart. The story of a smart and determined immigrant girl trying to penetrate the American Dream, it is a work of fiction that resides in the reality we live today, showing the human side of debates about immigration reform, citizenship, and what it really means to be an American.

***

Melissa de la Cruz is the #1 New York Times, #1 Publisher’s Weekly and #1 Indie Bound bestselling author of many critically acclaimed and award-winning novels for readers of all ages. Her books have also topped the USA Today, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times bestseller lists, and have been published in over twenty countries. A former fashion and beauty editor, Melissa has written for The New York Times, Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Allure, The San Francisco Chronicle, McSweeney’s, Teen Vogue, CosmoGirl! and Seventeen. She has also appeared as an expert on fashion, trends and fame for CNN, E! and FoxNews. Melissa grew up in Manila and moved to San Francisco with her family, where she graduated high school salutatorian from The Convent of the Sacred Heart. At Columbia University, she majored in art history and English. Today she lives in Los Angeles and Palm Springs with her husband and daughter.

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Cherisse Yanit Nadal is a recipient of PAWA, Inc.’s Manuel G. Flores Prize in Writing and is a 2013 VONA Fellow. Her work has been published in Oatmeal Magazine and featured in Dirty Laundry Lit, Sunday Jump, and Tuesday Night Cafe. She is a former West Coast Correspondent for DC Asian Pacific American Film, Inc. and has also served two years as Assistant Editor at Kaya Press. Cherisse co-created and co-hosted the two-year literary podcasting project Blue Book Buzz. She can often be found singing behind her steering wheel on any number of L.A. freeways. She one-ups Queen Bey by adding tea and chia to the hot sauce in her bag… swag. You can follow her on twitter @cherisseyanit.

Episode #119: Ramzi Fawaz, author of THE NEW MUTANTS: SUPERHEROES AND THE RADICAL IMAGINATION OF AMERICAN COMICS

Episode #119 with Ramzi Fawaz, author of The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics.

 

A bit about the book:

In The New Mutants, Ramzi Fawaz draws upon queer theory to tell the story of these monstrous fantasy figures and how they grapple with radical politics from Civil Rights and The New Left to Women’s and Gay Liberation Movements. Through a series of comic book case studies – including The Justice League of America, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and The New Mutants –alongside late 20th century fan writing, cultural criticism, and political documents, Fawaz reveals how the American superhero modeled new forms of social belonging that counterculture youth would embrace in the 1960s and after. The New Mutantsprovides the first full-length study to consider the relationship between comic book fantasy and radical politics in the modern United States.

 

 

 

Ramzi Fawaz is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Episode #118: Angela Peñaredondo, author of ALL THINGS LOSE THOUSANDS OF TIMES

Episode #118 with poet Angela Peñaredondo, author of ALL THINGS LOSE THOUSANDS OF TIMES!

Born in Iloilo City, Philippines, Angela Peñaredondo is a Pilipinx/Pin@y poet and artist (on other days, she identifies as a usual ghost, comet or part-time animal) . He book, All Things Lose Thousands of Times is the winner of the Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize.  She/Siya is author of the chapbook,Maroon (Jamii Publications). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AAWW’s The Margins, Four Way Review, Cream City Review, Southern Humanities Review, Dusie and elsewhere.

She/Siya is a VONA/Voices of our Nations Art fello, a recipient of a University of California Institute for Research in the Arts Grant, Gluck Program of the Arts Fellowship, Naropa University’s Zora Neal Hurston Award, Squaw Valley Writers Fellowship and Fishtrap Fellowship. She/Siya has received scholarships from Tin House, Split This Rock, Dzanc Books International Literary Program and others. Angela resides in Southern California, drifiting between deserts, beaches, lowly cities and socially engineered suburbs.

Also, here are Angela’s video poems from the Center for Art and Thought:

“Between a Season of Desire and a Season of Dust” : Suzanne Bottelli’s The Feltville Formation

By Leah Silvieus

Suzanne Bottelli’s The Feltville Formation (Finishing Line Press 2015) is ambitious. Within the chapbook’s slim 26 pages, Bottelli, who was born and raised in New Jersey, reaches from the state’s geologic history in the first poem, “To a Rogue Boulder in Sunlight,” into the present day. While tracing the industrial and cultural history of the area, Bottelli deftly unwinds the genealogy of what has made not only New Jersey, but also the country as a whole, “go and grow”– and its consequences. In collection’s title poem, we glimpse a billboard: “[…] a white man in a cap  / pours the milky bucketful above a rooftop: / PAINT WITH EAGLE PURE WHITE LEAD.” The image conjures a “milky” and superficially wholesome, vision of American industry, but one that is also heavy with connotations of literal whitewashing and its poisonous aftermath.

In the collection’s second poem, “Ironbound,” Bottelli walks the reader backward through a complex litany of industrial and environmental development: before “the waterfront renewal project / with its green playfields and jumpsuit orange boardwalk,” before “the days when reactor boil-over / was hosed down the old blood troughs and into the river,” there was the founding of Lister Agricultural Chemical works, whose purpose was “to grind up bones for glue and grease (to make things go), / and for feeding the soil, to make things grow.” Bottelli reminds us that the visions of the past often fuel the present – literally, in this case.

Bottelli’s infusion of childhood memories makes the collection as intimate as it is ambitious, and that is perhaps the chapbook’s greatest strength as it vitalizes the links between past and present. One of the most striking poems in the collection is “Fort Lee, NJ: July 4, 1976,” in which the child narrator presents New Jersey in a surreal and cinematic flash: cash “fluttering like green birds from above,” “the summer air jubilant with sirens,” “[s]chooners plying the destroyed river,” “a woman with a frosted swoop of hair / perched on the bench of her very own Wurlitzer.” “What a party,” Bottelli writes, “Two hundred years / in the blink of an eye.” Toward the end of the collection, Bottelli invites the reader to appreciate the present moment through the immediacy that often only a child can have:

 

“As when the mind starts sifting,
like a kid with a lifted window screen,
for the glints and grains that might give

delight before the whole show
is over – […]”

 

How quickly the present moment is over; how quickly we move through time. While awareness of the present moment may not necessarily be a remedy for the oversights and errors of the past, The Feltville Formation seems to suggest that such awareness may be a small step toward creating a livable future – as our present inevitably becomes our past.

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Leah Silvieus

Leah Silvieus is a poet and interdisciplinary artist whose work has been featured at the O, Miami Poetry Festival and at the Asian American Women Artists Association in San Francisco. She also has received grants and fellowships from Fulbright, Kundiman, US Poets in Mexico, and the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation. Her writing has been featured in Asian American Poetry & Writing, CURA, The Collagist, and diode, among others. Currently, she divides her time between Florida and New York where she works in the yacht hospitality industry. You can visit her athttp://leahsilvieus.wordpress.com/

In the Beginning (After the End): on T.J. Jarrett’s Ain’t No Grave

By Leah Silvieus

T.J. Jarrett’s Ain’t No Grave (New Issues Press 2013) calls our attention to the apocalypse that was the legacy of American racism and slavery and then culls from its ashes the bones that would sing themselves beyond the grave. The collection is less elegy than post-apocalyptic creation story: “Come now,” she writes in “Interrobang,” the opening poem of the collection, “Interrogate the mixing bowl  / of my throat. Claim what is left in it.”While Jarrett’s voice is one of the most beautiful lyrical voices I’ve encountered recently, these poems’ beauty does not soften their ability to strike at the heart. Jarrett’s encantatory lyricism is both fierce and tender; her songs call us to face the history of atrocity with the most human aspects of ourselves.

One of the most moving poems of the collection is titled, “My Father Explains the History of Sugar, the Middle Passage and Slavery to My Brother, Age 5, over Breakfast,” which I will quote here in its entirety because to break it up for the sake of quotation would be to undermine the poem’s powerful and elegant lyrical structure:

The history of sugar is the history of skin.
Consider this bowl, filled with sugar.
This glass, filled with milk.
Your body, the value of the body –
filled with all you can make of it.
Would you trade that body for sugar
when you hunger, or the milk
when you thirst? How about someone
else, your sister, another body?

Say you wouldn’t.
Know you would.

Often throughout the collection, Jarrett’s lyrical voice creates the effect of a camera-perspective shift. We begin this poem imagining a boy at a breakfast table, listening as his father tells a story. By the final stanza, the camera has shifted. The volta turns on the reader: The “you” is no longer just the boy anymore. “You” is the reader; “you” becomes us. Jarrett has guided us into the frame of the story without our becoming aware of it. She stands beside us as we watch the events unfold, and it is this gentleness with which she achieves this shift that makes these poems so powerful and heartbreaking.

Jarrett has dedicated five of the poems in the collection to the victims of rape, hanging and burning in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. These poems, however, are not simply elegies to bury the dead but songs to resurrect them. The names that these poems bear, previously unknown to many of us, rise up to defy their anonymity. In “What We Say to the Water,” dedicated to Laura Nelson, who was raped and hanged on May 25, 1911, Jarrett writes, “Be still. No further. / Apologize to no one.”

Even as Jarrett’s poems command the work of resurrection, they do not leave the story there. Memory is not enough; resurrection, even, will not suffice. In “Lazarus,” she interrogates what happens after Christ commands Lazarus to “Rise up and walk”: “Did he turn his back / to the sound at first, cry out: It’s early yet.” Later in the poem, she records Lazarus’ impressions of the world with which he must re-engage: “How small now this earth, how tinny / its birdsong. How sloven the tree’s corporeal array.” Given Lazarus’ perspective, we might begin to ask ourselves: What are the stakes of resurrection? Of being called again into the land of the living, which now seems so small? Of walking again among those trees bearing their horrific “corporeal array”? Of truly seeing for the first time? We can no longer claim innocence; we must decide what to do with our new sight. As the speaker says in “When the Sun Nears the Earth in the West”: “Behold the spinning earth. Choose.”

After reading Ain’t No Grave, we as readers become sorts of Lazaruses, emerging from our tombs to gaze upon our world with newly opened eyes. Although this collection brings us face-to-face with the history of atrocity, Jarrett does not leave us at its mercy. In the final section of the book, she recounts the story of a girl who was afraid of the dark in which she writes, “Exhausted  / [my mother] brought me a flashlight. // With it, I would write / words into the darkness until / I could fill the room with them.” “Let there be light,” Jarrett’s voice calls out over the darkness. And there was, and here is, light.

***

Leah Silvieus

Leah Silvieus is a poet and interdisciplinary artist whose work has been featured at the O, Miami Poetry Festival and at the Asian American Women Artists Association in San Francisco. She also has received grants and fellowships from Fulbright, Kundiman, US Poets in Mexico, and the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation. Her writing has been featured in Asian American Poetry & Writing, CURA, The Collagist, and diode, among others. Currently, she divides her time between Florida and New York where she works in the yacht hospitality industry. You can visit her athttp://leahsilvieus.wordpress.com/

Happy Fall!

Dear listeners,

We’re finally back from a long summer and ready for the fall season of TBJ (though it’s still 90 degrees in Southern California)!

In the next few months, we’re rolling out interviews with some really awesome writers and cartoonists, like Jen Wang, and reviews of fantastic poetry collections ( to start, T.J. Jarrett’s Ain’t No Grave), chapbooks (Michelle Peñaloza’s Landscape/Heartbreak), comics, graphic novels and more.

We’ve been podcasting for six years (!), and we’re still committed to our mission of spotlighting underrepresented, diverse voices in the writing world, from poetry to comics, and we want to continue and put out more content!

But we need your help.  We’re starting our Patreon fundraising campaign to pay for file hosting for our shows, postage to send out promo materials and books to our contributors,  a new website, a new microphone and more. We hope you’ll help us out.

Gracias, salamat, thank you for your support and for tuning in!

-RC

Episode #110: Oliver de la Paz, author of POST SUBJECT, and a review of Sheryl Luna’s SEVEN

Episode #110!  Featuring an interview with Oliver de la Paz, author of POST SUBJECT, and a review by David Campos of Sheryl Luna‘s SEVEN!

Oliver de la Paz, author of POST SUBJECT

Oliver de la Paz is the author of four collections of poetry, Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby (SIU Press 2001, 2007), and Requiem for the Orchard (U. of Akron Press 2010), winner of the Akron Prize for poetry chosen by Martìn Espada, and Post Subject: A Fable (U. of Akron Press 2014).  He is the co-editor with Stacey Lynn Brown of A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (U. of Akron Press 2012). He co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of Asian American Poetry and serves on the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Board.  A recipient of a NYFA Fellowship Award and a GAP Grant from Artist Trust, his work has appeared in journals like Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, Tin House, Chattahoochee Review, and in anthologies such as Asian American Poetry:  The Next Generation. He is the music editor for At Length Magazine and he teaches in the MFA program at Western Washington University.

The book trailer for POST SUBJECT:

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Sheryl Luna earned a PhD in contemporary literature from the University of North Texas and an MFA from University of Texas, El Paso. Her first collection, Pity the Drowned Horses, received the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Notre Dame Press. It was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Colorado Book Award. Her second collection, Seven, was published by 3: A Taos Press in 2013

Reportback from Comikaze Expo: Female Fans Matter to Everyone

By Leighman Red Eagle

In light of the boiling climate of rabid sexism in the gaming community caused by GamerGate, attending the “Why Female Fans Matter” panel at this year’s Comikaze was an inspiring and rejuvenating experience.

GamerGate, a so-called “movement” meant to protest against corruption in video game journalism, led droves of gamer enthusiasts to vilify, harass, and threaten prominent women in video games.

Misogyny has plagued the female experience in nerd culture before GamerGate laid bare the toxic undercurrent affecting women. Thus, the importance of creating safe places for women to express themselves and find camaraderie with other women is more urgent than ever.

Moderator of the “Why Female Fans Matter” panel and Editor in Chief of FangirlNation.com, Victoria Irwin, introduced the panel by briefly addressed GamerGate and announced—“Don’t worry. It will blow over.”

The majority of panelists consisted of women who have already gathered to express their individual and collective love of media on a website called FangirlNation.com. The goal of the website is summarized in the following excerpt from their “About FangirlNation” page:

“We embrace all levels or fandom, nerdery, geekdom and culture, knowing that in the end we are all passionate about something. We banish the concept of “fake geek girl” knowing every woman deserves the chance to love what she loves without being questioned for her dedication.

We are Women. We are Fangirls. We are United in What We Love.

We are the FangirlNation and we want you to join us!”

The term “fake geek girl” is negative and dismissive stereotype of women who claim to be fans, or geeks as a means of gaining attention. This slur is notoriously used to bully and shut women out of the geek community by questioning their credibility.

The panel was a wonderful way for women to dispel this stereotype and to share their flourishing safe place for others to witness.  The panelist list included: Stephanie Hayslip, Jonelle Davila, Bethany Davis, Toni Adams, and A. Wrighton.

To kick off the questions, Irwin asked what their first introduction to geeky media and what got them hooked.

Bethany Davis, the craft columnist for FangirlNation.com and cosplayer, explained that she was raised in a home that celebrated genre and cult media. She added that her father used to go around the house yelling “Inconcievable!” a quote from the cult-film the Princess Bride.

Jonelle Davila, business owner of GeekdomWear.com, credited her constant exposure to geeky media to her grandmother who was a rare tried and true fan of many things. Jonelle noted that her grandma even had a “Tolkien shelf” in her home.

Wrighton, an author of genre-bending fantasy and steampunk fiction, explained that she was an avid reader of genre literature and a video game player. She then joked that she would play video games to take breaks from the progress on her current novel.

The panelists were then asked: “Have you been personally attacked by others in a fandom?”

Stephanie Hayslip, a connoisseur of horror movies and the official Loki Handler and Professional Cumberbatch Lover, shared that she has been snubbed by other horror fans who wouldn’t take her seriously enough to engage in serious conversations with her. She humorously noted, “I watch Hellraiser for comfort.”

Each panelist had experiences with microaggressions, snubbing, or attacks in the geek community. Since Bethany was dressed up as a character from the comic series Thor, she recalled that someone asked her whether she liked Thor or if she was simply into Chris Hemsworth. Amidst groans, another panelist retorted: “Umm, both?”

Nevertheless, it was challenging to hear about the obstacles these women have had to overcome in order to maintain a sense of comfort and safety for simply being fans.

Irwin then asked: what is one of the best moments that the panelists have experienced in geek culture?

Wrighton said she was approached by soldiers who loved a novel of hers that they read in an army book club. This was a pleasant surprise for her.

Toni Adams, a fan and columnist for live events and reviews on FangirlNation.com, said her favorite moments happened through her coverage on fan websites. There were instances where authors reached out to thank her for her reviews of their comics.

Davila stated that she has a strong passion about conventions because being there, with her friends, is where she felt most like herself— convention culture is a part of her identity.

To conclude the panel, Irwin asked the panel: “Why do female fans matter?”

Toni Adams answered: “women have the buying power.  In order to avoid being overlooked by financial and marketing experts, Adams iterates that women should demand their attention and consideration.

Wrighton shared about her daughter, who was brimming with happiness to dress up as Elsa from the Disney film Frozen for the convention, which made it even harder for her to understand why attackers are out there when women attend conventions to have fun.

Hayslip emphasized that people, especially women, need to seriously talk more about issues of discrimination because we are all currently paving the way for the future like Wrighton’s daughter.

After the panel, I found myself walking up to a massive audience crowding the Hot Topic Main Stage during the “My Little Pony – The Full Cast Reunion” panel.

Tara Strong, a voice actress for the My Little Pony, was given a letter a male fan had written in the voices of the characters and used to ask his date to the prom. The fan then had the honor of hearing his letter read by the actual voice actors.

“Bronies” are a fandom of boys and men who enjoy the animated show designed with themes and messages of female empowerment aimed at young girls, My Little Pony. Sometimes they are casual fans but the most notable “bronies” are men who make a stand to change cultural perceptions of males, regardless of age or orientation, and enjoy a “girly” cartoon.

While this was a wonderful experience — this celebration of the rejection of gender norms — I couldn’t help but feel a sense of imbalance in venues between the My Little Pony panel and the “Why Female Fans Matter” panel in regards to scale, space and fan participation.

As a male, I adored shows labeled as “girly” like Sailor Moon, Powerpuff Girls, Totally Spies, and more. Yet, I have never been questioned or made a fool of. I have also sailed by in conventions without running into the sort of resistance that the “Why Female Fans Matter” panelists have endured.

Of all of the casual to hardcore fans that I have met at conventions since I first started attending them in 2009, I have never had my knowledge base or personal beliefs questioned.

I was also raised in a nerdy home like Bethany Davis and Jonelle Davis, actively followed nerdy internet news sites and social media, and have seen enough memes and jokes to understand many references to television shows, books, and movies that I have never personally experienced.

If there were a term for men as widespread and hurtful as “fake geek girl,” I would definitely be accused of being one.

But the problem is that I haven’t.

I have never had anyone call me out for taking pictures of Chris Hemsworth, despite not knowing a single thing about Captain America besides what is presented in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The amount of Tweets tagged with “#GamerGate” that criticized or accused men for being a part of the “corruption” of gaming journalism were nowhere near as numerous or threatening as those sent to women.

It is horrid that the public finally noticed this rampant sexism when these women journalists feared for their safety and forcibly left their homes.

Hearing the panelists at “Why Female Fans Matter” and witnessing their endless supply of jokes and laughter made me appreciate that these women have found each other and are making spaces for other women to come together and to enjoy what they love without resistance.

This discussion reinforces the importance of looking critically at how society treats women in the geek culture and how everyone can work together to make it safer for women.

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Leighman Red Eagle

Leighman Red Eagle is currently a fourth year undergraduate studying Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. Currently, he is the art editor for the University’s art and literary journal, Mosaic. He born and raised in Moreno Valley, CA.