Escribe Aquí 2022 Artists
Caridad Moro-Gronlier is the author of Tortillera, winner of the TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Prize published by Texas Review Press (2021) and the chapbook Visionware published by Finishing Line Press (2009). She is a Contributing Editor for Grabbed: Poets and Writers Respond to Sexual Assault (Beacon Press, 2020) and Associate Editor for "SWWIM Every Day", an online daily poetry journal for women identified poets. Recent work can be found in The Best American Poetry Blog, Verse Daily, Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness (UF Press, 2021),and Limp Wrist Poetry Magazine. She resides in Miami, Florida with her family. @caridadmoro @caridadmoro1
Cuban-American Lexicon
In Español
the word
for girlfriend
does not exist.
Instead
I was his
novia
(Hyphen)
Intended
fiancé
bride
in training.
I was
neither
girl nor friend
to the boy
I chose
duty
down
the aisle
toward
the altar
where
novia
turned
into
spouse
consort
wife
(Hyphen)
esposa
in Español,
known also
to mean
shackle
manacle
handcuff.
As a Cuban-American, lesbian poet who is also a mother, an educator, and a first-generation daughter, my work examines, explores, and exists on the hyphen. My poetry represents the hinge that connects two cultures, the place where two separate identities meet and bow to one another, the space where expectations and social norms are learned and ultimately deconstructed. The ethos that guides the Escribe Aqui/Write Here Festival is not only in keeping with my work, but also a celebration of the intersection and cross-cultural representation that exists very specifically in Miami, and that aligns not only to my body of work, but to my very self. (Caridad Moro-Gronlier,– Project Curator, 2022)
Elisa Albo’s poetry in Passage to America recount her family immigrant story while Each Day More is a collection of personal and public elegies. A contributing editor of Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment and Healing, her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, most recently in the 2022 Holocaust Remembrance Day issue of Poetry Super Highway. An award-winning educator, she teaches at Broward College. @elisaalbo @AlboElisa
No Middle Name
Dash the space—
no middle name,
not so much
as an initial mark.
What defines
comes first
or last,
no sibling or father
interrupts the moniker.
My mother’s
is pain—Dolores—
a woman’s name.
--published in Passage to America, 2016
As a Jewish Cuban/Spanish girl who grew up in a small Southern town in central Florida and was drawn to Miami after college, the exploration and expression of bi- and tri-cultural experience through reading and the art of writing and poetry may well have saved my life. (Elisa Albo, 2022)
Francisco Aragón is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants. His books include, After Rubén (2005), Glow of Our Sweat (2010), and Puerta de Sol (2005). He’s also the editor of, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (2007). A native of San Francisco, CA, he is on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, where he directs their literary initiative, Letras Latinas. He has read his work widely, including at universities, bookstores, art galleries, the Dodge Poetry Festival and the Split This Rock Poetry Festival. @fjaragon2011 @fjaragon2010
Creed
I soared across the sky to peer
down at you all.
Each flap bringing me closer—
your idea of heaven.
No, I don’t believe.
My prayer’s a sheet of ice
scrutinized
by unforgiving heat.
Now my words are air.
Without remorse I compose—
hold you inside me.
Saints are sliced in four.
I sing the rhythm of their days.
Spirit endures, soft
as a kiss, calling
us to chorus, to convene
antepasados en el desierto.
To swallow what they teach.
for Carmen Calatayud
from After Rubén (Red Hen Press, 2020)
I love the dual-language ethos of this initiative! It’s very much in sync with my current project: a translation into English of Spanish poet Gerardo Diego’s Manual de espumas, a book he wrote in 1922 while living in a bungalow on the beach on the north coast of Spain. (Francisco Aragon, 2022)
Clayre Benzadón received her MFA at the University of Miami. Her chapbook, “Liminal Zenith” was published by SurVision Books in 2019. Her manuscript-in-progress, "Moon as Salted Lemon" was a finalist for the 2021 Robert Dana-Anhinga Poetry Prize and semifinalist for Sundress Publications' Reading Period. @clayrebenz
Hornbone Season
We grow horns and bones
to/get/her her and I
sin rest tame
in even order
by eve ice
erodes dolorido
en verano summer is sore
de / sol / ate sol skin the sun thin
fino si / no rouse a sour rose
delay its flourish lay above
it puzzle the swimming gar/den
a bovine sky vying for luck
for her season her heat/hen
temporada de parpadeos
huesos I crave you
give me / meat / meet me at
el cuerno / carnal / calor es su
vida (la subida) / eres corporal
Previously published in Pussy Magic's 2020 "The Bi Babes" Issue (wwww.pusssymagicheals.com)
The "Escribe Aqui" Residency and its mission, which emphasizes multilingualism and highlights writers from diverse intersections of cultures, lends closely to my own work--my writing is experimental in nature, surreal in form, and sometimes loosely fragmented with regards to its sense-making. These eccentricities in my own poems reflect the intricacies and sometimes "contradictions" I feel within my own identity as a Sephardic-Ashkenazic Jewish queer writer. (Clayre Benzadón, 2022)
Silvia Curbelo was born in Matanzas, Cuba, and emigrated to the U.S. with her family as a child. Her poetry collections include, Falling Landscape and The Secret History of Water, both from Anhinga Press, and Ambush, winner of the Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest. She has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the Cintas Foundation and the Writer’s Voice, as well as the Jessica Noble Maxwell Memorial Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review. Her poems have been published widely in literary journals and more than three-dozen anthologies and textbooks, including Poems, Poets, Poetry (Bedford/St.Martin) and The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (W.W. Norton). Silvia has lived in Tampa, Florida all her adult life. silvia.curbelo.71
Stories
In every story about rain an aging princess
daydreams about eternity.
Umbrellas bloom like violent afterthoughts.
Any girl dancing beside a fountain could be a prophecy
or just a product of the weather.
Her simple skirt the color of too late.
Tired of the usual talk bored angels gossip
about desire.
The anarchy of scars and distances.
The way hair being brushed sounds like delicate breathing.
You walk the wet streets with your voice
tucked inside you
so helpless you could sleep through every kiss.
The Betsy’s Escribe Aquí/Write Here, honors writers living life “on the hyphen” – Cuban-American in my case … On a personal level, it means a great deal to return to Miami Beach for this residency. This sunny, vibrant “beach town” was the entry point of our immigrant experience, a life that began in the shabby, one-bedroom Miami Beach apartment where my parents, my grandfather and I lived for the better part of a year in 1967. I remember 6th grade at North Beach Elementary, where I learned to speak English and to embrace the strange, new culture that would blend – sometimes perfectly, other times not so seamlessly – with my messy, colorful, loud, ever-present Cuban roots. It’s a very different Miami Beach now, but the spirit and energy of the place are the same in streets where Spanglish still rings with the joyful, uncomplicated music that has become the soundtrack of my life. (Sylvia Curbelo, 2022)
J. Bruce Fuller is a Louisiana native. His poems have appeared at The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, McNeese Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Louisiana Literature, among others. He has received scholarships from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He teaches at Sam Houston State University where he is Director of Texas Review Press. @jbrucefuller
The Conversion of Saul
Once, my father
was trampled
by a horse.
The horse was blind.
Neither saw
the other coming.
There was no time
to call out,
to warn him.
After his dusty
body rolled, he rose
slightly changed.
Originally appeared in The Southern Review, 54.2, Autumn 2017.
The Escribe Aqui/Write Here residency will … offer me the chance to think about, converse with, and hear from other artists who have experienced the intersections of multiple cultures. (J. Bruce Fuller, 2022)
Mia Leonin is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Fable of the Pack-Saddle Child (BkMk Press) and a memoir, Havana and Other Missing Fathers (University of Arizona Press). Leonin teaches creative writing at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. mia.leonin
Tree of Knowledge
My maker unfastened the branch from heaven’s hinge
And with that branch,
She pried open the three-poisoned god in me
And from that god,
She shook out the three-cornered sack of culpability in me
And from that sack,
She produced a three-pronged compass that unmoored the navigator in me
And from that navigator,
My maker ungendered the tri-phallus, triple-breasted woman in me
And from that woman,
My maker stippled a three-cornered quilt of kindness in me
And that quilt
Comforted the three-chimed loneliness in me
And that loneliness
Tuned the three-tongued oratorio in me
And the oratorio
Reverberated in the beak of the three-trilled bird
Who reached me just in time to tell you that
In the garden’s conjugations of war, envy, and greed,
You are beauty
And the infinitive of beauty is
to be.
The residency represents both immersion and refuge. It provides an immersion in the Betsy’s stunning visual art and literary legacy. The architecture, art, and geographical location are uniquely Miamiense. A stay at the Betsy is also a refuge from the day-to-day demands. (Mia Leonin, 2022)
Alexandra Lytton Regaladois the author of Relinquenda, winner of the National Poetry Series (BeaconPress, 2022) and Matria (Black Lawrence Press, 2017). Co-founderof Kalina press, Alexandra is author, editor, and/or translator of more thanfifteen Central American-themed books. @alexlregalado
EL PUENTE QUE NOS UNE
I left red gladiolas on the altar.
Patrón Santiago Apostól, your horse is spattered with mud.
San Alejo, your shoes are worn.
Acompáñanos y líbranos de todo mal.
This bridge is long and rickety.
Rotten planks, rusted nails moan every step.
Who built this?
We’ve had to leap across all that collapsed.
I have no choice.
Can’t stop to ask why.
Can’t rest.
There are people in front of us and people behind us.
The way back would be just as long.
Best to keep going.
We must get to the other side.
Con cada paso mi sombra pierde color.
The dark water offers my face and I say to it:
This is my one and only life.
Already others are pressing up behind me.
And others have moved too far ahead.
When someone falls I cannot stop to help.
Even though some look like papá, but younger.
Mamá, but mixed with my daughter’s face.
An old friend who died long ago.
Patrón, who will save us?
Will I turn into a fish if I fall?
Will I be jolted awake?
I consider myself Salvadoran-Miamian and it is an honor to participate in The Betsy's Escribe Aquí / Write Here Festival that addresses the challenges and rewards of living between two cultures. As Latinx we are constantly feeling the pull of these double attachments to place, language, and identity what I’m interested in is this: What responsibility do we have in shaping the narratives of our two countries? How can we bridge two countries and two cultures while belonging to both and neither at the same time? I am curious about the idea of geography as identity. There are so many intersections and transformations occurring within the Latinx identity.
We write to examine our ties, to recover, discover, or redefine identities.
We write to exorcise our memories, our parents’ memories.
We need to talk to our mothers, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, get to know their stories—record them, map our land and our history, research our family tree and its roots.
We need to plant ourselves in that ground—wherever it is, traveling between coordinates, suspended between those strips of land, write it and be the bridge. (Alexandra Lytton Regalado, 2022)
Olegario Diaz: Born in Caracas, Venezuela,Olegario Diaz moved to the USA at age 17 to study jazz at the Berklee Collegeof Music and then furthered his studies at New York’s Manhattan School of Musicwhere he earned a master’s degree. Diaz leads an active life as performer andrenowned author of several instructional books. He travels frequently to NewYork to record and perform - and now lives in Miami, Florida.
EdgarPantoja :Edgar PANTOJA is a Pianist, composer, arranger, and music educator whospecializes in modern and traditional Cuban genres, Latin jazz, and worldmusic. His engaging music combines Cuban roots sources of rumba, son, and timbawith international rhythms of samba, Moroccan Gnawa, jazz and funk. Born inSantiago de Cuba, Pantoja has spent decades touring and collaborating with anmyriad stars, including Rubén Blades, David Murray, and Angelique Kidjo. He wasalso pianist/keyboardist and arranger for Cuban conga maestro Pedrito Martinez.Pantoja graduated from the Conservatorio Esteban Salas and the ConservatorioJose Maria Ochoa, in Cuba. @edgarpantojamusic