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Buy: Kinds of Grace Publisher: FlowerSong Press Release Date: May 2024 How did you get into writing? Can you pinpoint a memory where it all began for you? When I was about five, I wrote a picture book called Pig Girl. I illustrated it too. It’s about a girl who turns into a pig because she’s so messy; it was a gift to my mother who often said I didn’t clean my room enough. Definitely probably passive aggressive. Still, it was the messy, loving work of a 5-year-old. My mother was actually delighted and said “Write more books, Jennifer!” I remember the feeling that maybe I could write another book after she expressed such excitement at my writing. I was always thinking of stories and poems ever since I can remember. Even in preschool I didn’t have the language for stories but I was dreaming them up with toys and my imagination. I’d go around as a kid cajoling my brother to act in plays I’d written. My mother would also read poems to me and I’d write my own response poems. I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller, a poet and a writer. What was the impetus for this body of work? Kinds of Grace started after I finished my first book, a cross-genre poetry & prose collection called SCAR ON/SCAR OFF, which was published back in 2017. Shortly afterward, I wrote a poem called “Apagón” about Hurricane Maria after just coming back from PR and finding out about the blackout, and a few other poems about loss. I put the poems aside, not ready for another collection and I wasn’t aware of a throughline yet. After I experienced a mental break in 2020, I had to dig my way out of recovery and I chronicled some of that journey in poetry. I also wrote about love, pain, Puerto Rico, being a Black woman in America, living in Fort Pierce, moving to Houston, finding personhood. I realized I had enough poems for a collection in the summer of 2022 and I sent the book out a year later after going through several revisions and deciding I wanted to publish it. I was so happy FlowerSong, and Edward Viduarre saw my heart. But it started with “Apagón” before I knew there would be a collection coming together. How did writing this book transform you? I learned how to forgive myself, give myself grace, come into community with those similar to and dissimilar to me. I wasn’t the same person as I was beginning the book, I was wholly changed. After it was done, I felt as if I inhabited myself more, understood myself a bit more, understood those I loved around me more. Did another artform influence this work? Painting, music, dancing, etc. Live music definitely informed this book. I would go to coffee shops in Houston and work on Kinds of Grace while listening to Spanish music. I definitely wanted the piece to have a certain musicality so listening to live music helped. I love dancing so I spent a great deal of time in my office, dancing out the jitters. You can often tell a lot about a book by how it begins and how it ends. What is the first line and last line of your book? The first line of the book is “I swallow the past, steadying myself against the back of a young birch tree” and the last line is “But I know no matter what,/The next moment comes.” I think these speak to each other. The first poem “The Past” is about letting go of that which binds you, of those who you loved and are no longer in your life, of the self you used to be. After the journey the speaker(s) undergo throughout this book with mental health, self and loss, the conclusion is that there is comfort in knowing that we won’t remain in any fixed state, the next moment will always come. There is always hope. William Carlos Williams is synonymous with plums. If you had to choose one fruit and one animal/plant/celestial body that would forever remind people of you, what would you choose and why? An apple. I have an attachment to them. They’re something soothing about the shape and texture. I also love the color red so Red Delicious are my jam. I had an apple tree outside of my house when I was a child and I would pluck apples and think of the individual fruits as memories. If I took a bite, I’d indulge in a memory. Plus, I practically gorge on apples. So definitely an apple. What are you currently reading? I have my TBR ready to go for the spring. I bought Annell Lopez’s I’ll Give You a Reason, Jose Hernandez Diaz’s Bad Mexican, Bad American, Marcos Carlos Griffin’s American Daughter, Phillip B. Williams' Ours, Michael B. Wang’s Lost in the Long March, Gabriel Bump’s The New Naturals, January O’Neill’s Glitter Road, Luis Alberto Urrea’s Piedra, Dustin Pearson’s A Season in Hell with Rimbaud and Jen Fawkes’s Tales the Devil Told Me. Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of SCAR ON/SCAR OFF, When Trying to Return Home and Kinds of Grace. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio and CantoMundo and her work has been a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Best Fiction Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and a Must-Read by Elle, Latinx in Publishing, Ms. Magazine and Southern Review of Books. She is fiction editor at Pleiades and an assistant professor at the University of Houston-Clear Lake.

In an email interview, I asked Alcalá about the way mothers train daughters to survive the constant threat

Buy: What We Do with God by Daniella Toosie-Watson | Haymarket Books | Publication Date: September 09, 2025 | Pages: 80 | EAN/UPC: 9798888903704 What non-living poet/writer had the biggest influence on your book?   Franz Kafka, for sure. His work’s impact on me is responsible for so much of What We Do with God.   Before anything literary/academic/bookish, reading Kafka at that young age gave me a methodology to contend with Christianity and everything that the faith mapped onto me and wanted to make of me. I was a teenager, a survivor; I was grieving and entrenched in the church—I used Kafka’s work to frame my understanding of my condition and to contend with the world around me, my experience with mental illness, and general day-to-day mundanities.   For What We Do with God , to honor the influence that class had on the book, I wrote “Questions after Reading Kafka in Eleventh Grade.” Beyond that poem, Kafka’s sensibilities offered different frameworks for approaching my book on the level of the poem and the broader questions of thematic scaffolding and tenor.     How did you get into writing? Can you pinpoint a memory where it all began for you?   When I was in middle school (I think I was age 12) I had a friend who was a very talented freestyle rapper. I asked him to teach me how to freestyle. He told me to try writing, first—that he’d look at it, and we’d go from there.   As I got a little older, I learned, “oh—this isn’t my lane, let me not appropriate this.” Nevertheless, that was my beginning: studying rap battles, different rappers/hip-hop artists and their approaches.   Can you talk about your use of form and theory?   The thinkers and frameworks I’ve tended toward over the years taught me how to achieve my favorite poetic move, that is, how to make associative leaps between seemingly disparate things in order to engender surprise, something with particularities that would not be achieved without that specific pairing.   I think my interest in this way of writing had to have started with my interest in freestyle rap—my early studies and attempts towards developing the agility and intellectual dexterity needed for freestyle rap informed the varying kinds of associative leaps you can see in my poems. Then, there came Kafka in 11 th grade. Then: Russian Formalism, defamiliarization, artists like Arthur Jafa. Actually, the associative approach to poetry is often how I go about my short poems—it’s how I am able to cover so much ground with so few lines, like in the prologue poem of What We Do with God , “The Bug” (where I also nod towards both associative poetry and folks who might disparage my use of it, and also where I let the reader in on what’s to come in the collection): “…is this a leap? / What did you expect? For me to let the bug / just be a bug.” That I draft most of my poems via stream-of-conciousness is also informed by my history of loving freestyle rap as a form. Many of the poems in What We Do with God either are or started as stream-of-consciousness. For example, “God is Dog Spelled Backward” is very much a stream-of-consciousness poem. I wrote it in one sitting and the revisions were mostly cosmetic. Maybe a word-swap here, a line-break there, but the conceptual unfolding and ordering of information—what you see on the page in the book, now, is how it was initially drafted.   When some folks talk about “stream-of-conciousness,” they sometimes refer to it as “word vomit” (a phrase I detest, btw). But, no—I refuse that naming entirely. Contrary to these kinds of categorizations, stream-of-conciousness takes training and study—a river runs, but the shape of the river and how it flows is all dependent on where and how the rocks, plants, etc are situated in the water. Study and training situate and resituate our writing and its respective processes.   My friend from college, Twayne Towns, is brilliant in both written and freestyle rap. Nothing about what he does is frivolous or accidental—its pointed, precise. Please do not mistake my use of “accidental” as my saying there is no room for play and experimentation—both are necessary, and for sure, accidents can lead to art-making. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about rejecting pretentiousness within and across a literary scope, and beyond a literary purview, any artistic framework that claims itself the codifier of what is or isn’t literary, what is or isn’t art. Folks, who, should turn the gaze back on themselves to examine their notions around skill, talent, and what’s worthy of study and attention. Folks who need to turn on the music video, open the book, listen to the song, go to the slam, go to the reading, the workshop, the classroom, the studio, the church service, that they might fill-in the gaps of their study, stop harming people, and, with any luck at all: shut up.   Who are your mentors? How did they help you shape your book?   Greg Pardlo and Vievee Francis—both of whom I worked with at the 2015 & 2016 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop—changed the trajectory of my life. Without their tutelage and care, I really don’t know what my life would look like right now.   If we’re talking about mentorship on the level of craft, though: Greg helped me, in his words, “develop of sense of narrative architecture to complement and frame [my] associative leaps.” I met Greg very early in my writing journey when my poetry was quite abstract. He helped me to not necessarily reel-in my imagination, but rather, to conceptualize what my imagination could do and become when it has a scaffolding or structure.   With Vievee, in terms of craft and method: under her tutelage I studied and practiced writing in various forms. What’s more, she gave us practical, employable guidance on how to examine our grief and come out on the other side of the writing, intact.   I have mentors in other ways, too. I consider the writers/thinkers/figures who I study but haven’t met to be mentors; and their work, my mentors. I consider songs that have taught me something about pacing and building tension to be mentors. I consider the relationship between an epigraph and a poem that introduces me to something new, to be a mentor. Mentorship doesn’t have to be from someone you know. For so many people for so many reasons, person-to-person mentorship isn’t accessible. Plus, this alternative kind of mentorship often feels (and is) safer.     How did writing this book transform you?   Writing What We Do with God transformed me in so many ways: taught me about longsuffering, patience, and consistency. Showed me that I believed in myself. I mean, if I didn’t believe in myself, I wouldn’t have kept writing with no clear ending—I wasn’t writing on a press’s deadline or anything. I was writing to make something I loved and was proud of, that I believed would be picked up when I was finished writing it. I wrote for 8 years without an expected end. Indeed, I became a person who is willing to wait.   I learned to love my writing. I’m not the self-loathing artist. I’ve worked and am working too hard to be self-deprecating. Folks can dislike my work if they want to—that’s fine, and also not my business (granted that the reason for not liking my work is aesthetic/stylistic/rooted in an “ism,” etc.—if the reason is that I’ve written something harmful, then that’s another conversation and is very much my business).   To be clear, I can and do acknowledge when something I create isn’t up-to-par with what I want for my work, but I read something that said, “you can’t hate yourself into a version you can love.” If a poem isn’t fully-developed, I am going to nurture it until it is. Nurturing a poem might look like using gentle language like “not fully-developed,” studying, reading, giving myself a break, taking a walk, looking at art that inspires me, revision, revision, revision. But what I won’t do is tell myself that my art is shit 1. Because it’s not 2. Because no. I don’t accept being spoken to that way, and by extension, I won’t treat my writing that way. Yes—I’ve dedicated myself to this work, will continue to dedicate myself to this work, and I refuse expectations of humility or playing-small or being-small.     What are you currently reading?   Gbenga Adesina, Death Does Not End at the Sea . Daniella Toosie-Watson is a writer, visual artist, and the author of What We Do with God (Haymarket Books, 2025). Her work has been published in The Atlantic , The Paris Review , Oxford Poetry , Callaloo , Virginia Quarterly Review , and elsewhere. Her honors include the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize Shortlist, the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, and a Graduate Hopwood Award & Zell Fellowship from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program where she received her MFA in poetry. Daniella lives in New York.

Buy: Brutal Companion by Ruben Quesada | OCTOBER 15, 2024 | BARROW STREET PRESS ISBN: 978-1-962131-03-2 | $18.00 Which living poet/writer had the most influence on your book? D.A. Powell has had the most influence on  Brutal Companion . His work, notably his trilogy, has had a significant impact on my approach to writing about queer experiences and the junction of personal and political issues. There’s a poetic beauty that cleaves reality that has encouraged me to achieve a similar balance in my work. I’m drawn to poets who demonstrate attention to similar social concerns as my own, but perhaps more importantly, poetry with rhythm and sound with particular attention to detail for the natural world and the perspective it offers.  Over the past decade, I’ve been voraciously reading contemporary poetry and there is so much to draw from these days. If I had to share poets whose use of rhythm and sound most resonated with me–Diane Mehta, Sean Thomas Dougherty, and Philip Metres. The nature of expression in the work of Mai Der Vang, Anthony Cody, and Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is exciting. I could go on… Which non-living poet/writer had the most influence on your book? The late Paul Monette had a significant effect on this collection. His visceral, unembellished depictions of love and loss during the AIDS crisis in works such as Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog  influenced my approach to writing about grief, sexuality, and the complexity of identity. What is your favorite line(s) in your book? It is difficult to choose, but I particularly like these lines from the poemtry "Aubade:” "In the dark, I listen, now resigned, you mumble about the arms of pinyon pine, saying it points to a falling star against the serrated pool of sky." These lines encapsulate a sense of intimacy and cosmic wonder, which I strive for in most of my work. What are the primary themes in your book? Brutal Companion  probes multiple linked topics, including identity, loss and grief, the complexities of intimate connections, and the need for connection in an often hostile society. How has authoring this book changed you? Writing Brutal Companion  was a deeply transforming experience. It compelled me to address traumatic memories and feelings, particularly those involving loss and identity. The process of drafting these poems enabled me to have a better understanding of my experiences and how larger cultural and historical frameworks informed them. It also strengthened my trust in poetry's ability to express complicated feelings and experiences that would otherwise go unheard. Did this work have any influence from another art form? Visual art, especially painting, has had a considerable impact on this collection. Several poems, such as "Oath of the Horatii" and "Angels in the Sun," include direct references to specific artworks. The ekphrastic approach offered possibilities to explore emotional and thematic terrain. When I first conceived of this book, I received a grant for travel to museums around the country that allowed me first-hand experience for further ekphrastic writing.  Instead of imitation, the goal is to have an association with the original piece and make something that stands on it while also casting light on elements of the original material. We use public images and videos in creative ways when I teach ekphrasis. My process usually includes inspecting the original work and analyzing it, then using both literal and figurative language when speaking about that experience. Something that strikes a chord with me could be a subject, the imagery, the rhythm, or a single line. After that, I allow my thoughts and experiences to mix with the main idea of the original work.  The goal is to make a multilayered piece that pays tribute to the original and adds something new to the conversation about the arts. I figure out what is remarkable about the piece that interests me—is it the language, the images, or the feelings that are hidden beneath the surface? This is where I begin.  I spent two years visiting museums around the country and in Europe. It began by flying to Los Angeles, where I was able to visit my mom. Then it was a daily visit to museums in the area: the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Getty Villa in Malibu. Then, I went north to San Francisco, where its pub parks and artwork most inspired me. I visited the de Young Museum of Fine Art and Legion of Honor Fine Arts Museums; I shared an afternoon in Dolores Park with a friend.  In the second year, over one week, I traveled to Spain, where I visited the Reina Sofía, Prado, and Picasso art museums. On to Italy, where I visited palazzi and libraries in Bologna then in Venice, I arrived in time for Carnevale. Before returning home, I spent a day in Berlin at the Topography of Terror and Museum Island. I wish I could do all that again with more time.  What was the motivation for this collection of work? The impulse for Brutal Companion  stemmed from a desire to investigate and confront personal and collective traumas. My private and public life are intertwined and mutually influential to my work. In sharing this deeply personal narrative, I aim not for sympathy but for empathy—a bridge of understanding between my experience and the collective. The U.S. health crisis, intimate relationships, and the desire to belong are all central to this motivation.  One year after moving to Chicago, I was ready to begin a new chapter of my life. I was going to get involved with extraordinary poetry and teaching programs in the city. It was the start of August. I was turning forty, changing careers, recently single, and then diagnosed with HIV.  There I was, poised at the intersection of multiple transitions, my body in distress through what I initially dismissed as mere allergies. I’m allergic to everything outdoors (grass, trees, & flowers). After two weeks, the symptoms took a turn for the worse. For the rest of the month, I slept only a few hours at a time.  Those August days were rough. The fever hit me hard, messing with my body and my mind. It felt like I was stuck in some weird, hazy dream. Even though I felt awful, I kept thinking about my new teaching job and my upcoming birthday. It was like life was saying, "Hey, I'm still moving forward whether you're ready or not.  The fever kept getting worse until one day, I just knew something was seriously wrong with my body. I managed to call my neighbor for help. She came over, let herself in, and called 911. It was intense. I don’t know how I managed it, dealing with being so sick while also trying to hold onto the good stuff coming up in my life. It took me years to adapt, losing work and breaking commitments along the way. I wish I’d managed it differently, but context doesn’t always matter.  “Love moves me and makes me speak,” said Dante. It took another few years before I finally settled in Chicago, months before the COVID-19 lockdown. I moved in with my now fiancé.  The transitional nature of my life has made me resilient, for better or worse. The poems I wrote sat around for more than a decade. I never sent them out. Most were written when I first moved to Chicago. They celebrate life, recognize its loss, and find a way to reconcile what has passed. My love of language motivated me, and life kept me writing.  Are you working on a new project? Could you tell us a little about it? Yes, I am now working on a new poetry collection about the intersection of technology and human emotion. I am particularly interested in how artificial intelligence and digital environments are changing our perceptions of identity, relationships, and creativity. The project's goal is to combine parts of speculative poetry with more classic lyric genres to establish a conversation between the human and the technical. It is still taking shape, but I am excited to see where this journey takes me. Ruben Quesada ’s latest poetry collection, Brutal Companion , winner of the Barrow Street Press Editors Prize, published October 15, 2024. He edited the anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry, which won an Independent Publisher Book Award in 2023. Quesada’s work appears in prestigious publications including Seneca Review , American Poetry Review , the Best American Poetry series, Harvard Review , and The New York Times Magazine . Quesada has received fellowships from the Jentel Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Community of Writers, Napa Valley Writers’, and CantoMundo.

Buy: Luna Inmigrante by Virginia Bulacio | Alegría Publishing | June 27, 2023 Personalized signed copies with stickers, copies available on writer’s website What living poet/writer had the biggest influence on your book? I came to the United States during my high school years, and I joined an E.S.L class (English as a Second Language). One of my teachers, Miss Ritvo, shared the book The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. Some days, Miss Ritvo would read the book to us and other days, she would play the audiobook for us. It was illuminating to follow the book and Cisneros' words while reading the stories. I was transported to another time. In my imagination I would travel back to my small town in the north of Argentina. I felt connected to Cisneros' novel and the main character, Esperanza. I remember feeling like the writer would understand me. I carry those stories close to me, it’s a reminder of where I come from. Sandra Cisneros inspired me at a young age to create stories, bilingual stories para nuestra comunidad. Her work continues to inspire me today and I hope one day I can share Luna Inmigrante with her. How did your relationship with your family influence your writing? My relationship with my family has influenced my writing. I think they helped me understand in a way our immigrant journey. Some of the experiences we faced earlier in the journey later became a poem or reflection in my book. Those poems or reflections helped me to see our stories from different points of view, as the voice of an immigrant, what really matters in our heart. Luna Inmigrante is dedicated to mi familia and my friends who qualified for DACA, and those friends who did not, people I would see on the bus on a daily basis, workers and activists who joined rallies during Labor Day. They have influenced me each day and inspired this poetry collection, as we are one family, from the point of view of Luna Inmigrante. How did writing this book transform you? Luna Inmigrante has helped me understand that our stories are all connected, therefore my poems reflect that we are all part of everyone’s journey. Writing my book allowed me to heal, channel and transform that pain in energy in motion, within each line of poetry in Luna Inmigrante. With time, I am realizing Luna Inmigrante is here to transform us, heal us, grow together, and celebrate our stories and where we come from. I think transformation comes from healing, and each story represents a voice in our community, showing our diversity and honoring our stories. Did another artform influence this work? Painting, music, dancing, etc. I would like to say motherhood is an artform. I think becoming a new mom in the pandemic inspired me to share my work with others. Motherhood gave me the strength to share my work, and hopefully inspire other writers to do the same. When my son was a newborn, I would take him on walks and I would pay close attention to the details he would see, the texture and colors of plants, our shadows, the petals of roses, as he would show excitement by moving his little hands so fast like an orchestra director. And to me that was a new artform, a new way of expression that I carry in my poetry. All these magical moments with him influenced me to create a new way of writing. Outside of writing, what are some of your passions or hobbies? Photography, photojournalism, taking Polaroids, the beauty of capturing a moment as it is, without any editing, this has been a passion project. Either I am on a walk or playing with my son outside, watching the clouds, waiting for the sunset, I enjoy taking photographs, seeing my son growing up, and documenting time. Photography is an artform that inspires my creativity, and it allows me to experiment with time and light. If you could have a dinner party with anyone living or dead, who would it be and why? What would you serve for dinner? The first person that came to my mind was mi abuelo. He was like my father to me. I would probably serve empanadas Argentinas, maybe he can teach me how to make an Argentine Parrillada (Argentinian bbq) like the ones he used to make when I was growing up. Years after I moved to the United States, he passed away. I did not have a chance to say goodbye or thank him for taking care of me when I was little. This dinner would be like a reunion to honor him and show him my gratitude. Virginia Bulacio is an Argentinean writer, educator, and storyteller. She immigrated to the United States during her high school years. Virginia holds a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and a Minor in Spanish Language Journalism from California State University, Northridge. Her mission in teaching is to share her passion about culture, storytelling, and poetry. She is teaching subjects such as Spanish and Photography at a school in which the mission is to help the student emotionally, socially, and academically through positivity and mentoring. Virginia lives in Los Angeles with her family, and you would probably find her at a coffee shop looking for a story.

Buy: El Rey of Gold Teeth Watch: El Rey of Gold Teeth (ASMR?) Unboxing Hub City Press | ISBN: 9798885740197 | $16.00 | Oct. 3, 2023 What living poet/writer had the biggest influence on your book? I was lucky to have worked with Eduardo C. Corral for El Rey of Gold Teeth after he graciously took on some mentees for their poetry collections. I’d learned so much from him from Slow Lightning, a book that opened me to new dimensions of craft and language ever since I read it in college. He really pushed me to place my poems into different containers, to let them become the best versions of themselves through individual forms that couldn’t exist otherwise. Can you talk about your use of form and theory? As a writer, the tools for my craft encompass language in all its forms, as many as I can play within as possible. As such, I write fiction, poetry, essays, and more to find my limitations and liberties. I firmly believe that form and content cannot be separated, so whenever I choose a form for which my language can be expressed best for that project, I have to be very certain that that was the best container for the project at the time. As in, my first book, a collection of short stories, exists because those thoughts and languages could only be expressed that way. One story in that collection takes the form of a court document filed on Mars that appropriates legal language for fiction, a regular practice in American politics; that was my way of playing with that form to say what I wanted to say. However, that’s not to say that this latest book, a collection of poetry, does not explore similar themes or subjects, but that the poetry allowed me to access new ways of looking at the same thing. In my experience, forms are merely conduits for language and thus should be thought of as facilitators and not funnels. For example, if a short story cannot cover everything you want to do within a given project, then try it as a poem since poetry is not bound by the sentence insomuch as the line. If a poem isn’t working, then try an essay as the essay can allow the writer the tools to show one’s math, so to speak, more smoothly, such as through citations or digressions or thought process (at least for me). In El Rey of Gold Teeth, there’s a poem in the form of a translation of a broken turtle’s shell as I was fascinated by the fact that species of turtles all have the same number of plates that comprise their shells, like the red eared slider’s 13 scutes. Thus, I wanted to explore the red eared slider’s shell as an ancestral inheritance, that it was telling them something about their past that they carried but could not see alone. Moreso, it is a ‘translation’ of a broken shell, further fragmenting the history in which they carry, making such a history even more illegible to human language, further complicating the notion of inheriting history and language across languages and contexts. In that way, the red eared slider’s shell becomes a historical document and a textual embodiment of the immigrant experience. I honestly don’t believe any other form that piece could have taken as fiction or essay or what have you often have linear progressions bound by the sentence. The poem, for me, allowed me to clunkily sing what I could not directly say as efficiently and playfully. What is your current obsession? Short lines, slant rhymes, couplets, trees, etc. My current obsession for my poetry is establishing a form for a poem and running it into the ground by continuously writing in it until I break all its rules. In that way, I find the form’s first limitation for me and know what to indulge in the new form that sprouts from the former. In this case, it’s the use of a single stanza to fill the expanse of a page, mainly through line spacing and generous line breaks to make the scarce seem abundant, to make the reader slow down as to not get dizzy or lost in the language. In a way, the poems are becoming more visual in how they occupy the white space of a page, how the form embodies the content in ways I couldn’t see at first, like carving words into the marble of the page. How did writing this book transform you? This book really let me see how badass poetry truly is. Like, how awesome it is to play with language in such a way as to explore its power and violence and joy. Writing this book gave me the power to share my love for my people, my city, my community in ways that either make people proud of themselves and what we share or to look at what we have in new ways. This book let me navigate my given and learned languages however I wanted. For example, I have a poem in the form of a pulga; I can’t wait for readers to engage with that piece and share in the beauty of something so normal yet so wondrously human. My first book let me see myself as a published author who is contributing to a larger conversation; this book that let me become the writer I’ve always wanted to be. That is, the kind of writer that will always take something and run it as far as it can go in that moment. This book transformed me into a full writer on my terms, into someone whose lot in this life is to write and share stories and ways to play with what we’ve been given. I couldn’t be more thankful. What role does the poet play in the 21st century? A giant influence on my writing is Tomás Rivera, especially his book …y no se lo tragó la tierra. There’s a short passage in the book that briefly tells of a poet who travels between migrant worker camps to sell them poetry, tailoring them to local communities by including their names. The poet provides instructions to his customers, telling them: “…to read the poems out loud because the spoken word was the seed of love in the darkness.” It was there that I learned that the writer gives their community the language to find each other in times of darkness, to share love even when the world makes it harder to see the light. In that way, the poet gives each member of their community the ability to become a beacon of love. For me, the poet in the 21st century carries on that tradition of taking language and sharing it amongst their communities to give them the power to speak, now more than ever when language is being obfuscated, used for violence, and facilitating oppression and division on a more massive scale than ever. My role is to tell you that love is real and that there is no singular use for language. We can use language to see a better reality than the one we currently have. When you read my work, I hope you see that language is something we can play with to process our histories towards a healing. That language is “the seed of love in the darkness.” Outside of writing, what are some of your passions or hobbies? Too many! But one passion that I’m enjoying lately is my curatorial practice, how I capture the thoughts and languages I can’t process through my writing (yet) but through organizing. I curated and launched a virtual exhibition in 2022 titled The Houston Artist Speaks Through Grids where I noticed many Houston artists of color of various backgrounds and practices using grids in their artwork. I curated the exhibition to put said artworks in conversation with the political, historical, and pedestrian to try and see how the grid, a conduit of colonialism, can be appropriated by the creative imagination by and for marginalized communities. The exhibition is free and accessible in English and Spanish. In 2023, I curated and launched a series titled The Pylon Project in conjunction with The Houston Artist Speaks Through Grids where I invited artists and writers to play with the icon of the pylon sign, those big signs you see alongside strip malls and/or shopping centers that list their contents. These pylon signs permeate throughout Houston’s grids of streets, particularly unique as Houston has no traditional zoning laws, often placing things together that can complement and/or clash with each other. That too is free to visit online but also has a limited print run featuring each essay as a zine. In 2024, I’ll be making another addition to the exhibition which I won’t say what it is yet. The point being, it’s really cool to work on something that grows with you yet has a foundation upon which to build, all of which is accessible and updated as you explore it more and more. The exhibition, then, is a conduit for aesthetic growth and organizing facilitated by visual language that I hope to one day turn into an exhibition catalog in book form. Do you have any advice for new and emerging writers? Is there anything you wish you knew? As a writer, you can do whatever you want. For real. Throughout my writing career, whether it be the workshop or the editorial process, I’ve been told what I could or couldn’t do. But when I was told to not do something, that’s when I knew I had to keep it. It’s your work. Your craft. Your life. Do whatever you want. Please. What are you currently reading? I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction lately to help me with my own process, including: Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s by Tiffany Midge; From Threatening Guerillas to Forever Illegals by Yajaira M. Padilla; How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America by Kiese Laymon; Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino; I Can’t Date Jesus by Michael Arceneaux; Go Ahead in the Rain by Hanif Abdurraqib; and Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Do you have a new project that you’re working on? Could you tell us a bit about it? My next project is a collection of essays that focus on pop culture as a nation building exercise and practice, ranging from film to video games to natural disasters to beer to music to art to anime and much more. I think this collection will allow me to show my thought process in a different way, especially in making connections across various topics. For example, how does the depiction of football in American cinema connect to my navigation of Hurricane Harvey? How does drinking beer connect to the immigrant experience? You’ll have to read and find out! Other than that, I have a rotation of poems and stories and art criticisms and a novel that I work on at various intervals when the essays become too narrowing. I’ve also become a married man lately, so I’m always working on being a better husband. Reyes Ramirez (he/him) is a Houstonian, writer, educator, curator, and organizer of Mexican and Salvadoran descent. He authored the short story collection The Book of Wanderers (2022), a 2023 Young Lions Fiction Award Finalist, from University of Arizona Press’ Camino del Sol series and the poetry collection El Rey of Gold Teeth (2023) from Hub City Press. Reyes has been honored as a 2020 CantoMundo Fellow, 2021 Interchange Artist Grant Fellow, 2022 Crosstown Arts Writer in Residence, 2023 Intercultural Leadership Institute Fellow, 2023 Dobie Paisano Fellow, and others.

Buy: Syndrome by Éric Morales-Franceschini | Anhinga Press | January 1, 2024 | 96 pgs. | $20 | ISBN: 9781934695814 What living poet/writer had the biggest influence on your book? If I had to pick only one, it’d have to be Craig Santos Perez, which is to say, his from unincorporated territory series; it’s a kindred project, thematically, pedagogically, and politically, if not stylistically. It’s uncanny just how many grievances and peculiarities Guam and Puerto Rico share, each knowing well the enigma that is “commonwealth” status and what it means to feel “small.” I came to his work somewhat belatedly, after having already written a draft of Syndrome, but it quickly became an interlocutor of mine, a fellow traveler I could turn to in times of uncertainty, outrage, or grief. Other honorable mentions would go to J. Michael Martinez’s Museum of the Americas, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes’ The Inheritance of Haunting, and the obras of Ada Limón and Daniel Borzutzky—whether for their vitality or virtuosity. What non-living poet/writer had the biggest influence on your book? I’d answer this two ways. First off, there’s the work of Mahmoud Darwish, who, as a Palestinian poet, writes with a collective urgency and forlorn history that I, as a Boricua, can’t help but find beautiful and resonant.  Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy, which is difficult to classify, is easily one of the most stunning works I’ve ever read—at least in its original Spanish (i.e. can’t vouch for the English translation!); he and that project are a referent for me. But the truth is, many of my biggest influences come from studies in history, psychoanalysis, political economy, theology, and critical theory. I’ll go months where all I read are in these “non-literary” fields, without which my poetry would be far less analytically acute—less politically dangerous, too. In this respect, Marx, Freud, and Fanon rank amongst the most influential. What are some key themes present in your book? No doubt, militarism, racism, and colonialism are decidedly at stake, they and their psychical repercussions.  The notion of a syndrome is not, after all, purely metaphorical. “Puerto Rican Syndrome” was the name for what was considered a culturally unique nervous disorder. Psychoanalyst Patricia Gherovici has pointed out that its symptoms are strikingly similar to classical hysteria, with schizophrenic complications, and argues that its best understood as an idiom of protest against a psychologically unbearable situation, namely coloniality of power. Syndrome reckons with this and other “disorders,” like impostor syndrome (for those of us in the diaspora) and Stockholm syndrome (for those of us coerced to identify with our captor), and with major cultural referents, such as West Side Story, Hamilton, and the Columbus monument in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, the largest monument to Columbus in the world! In fact, it’s the largest monument (base included) in the western hemisphere, larger than Rio’s El Salvador and New York’s Statue of Liberty. Does that not speak volumes!? What’s your favorite line(s) from your book? That’s easy, the epigraphs!  I won’t give them all away, but here are a few of my favorites: Fuera de tu canción soy ala seca, Julia de Burgos; To whom shall we sing when salt poisons the dew?, Mahmoud Darwish; Que la historia huya de los museos y respire a pleno pulmón, Eduardo Galeano. None of my words can rival these in their depth and beauty, but maybe I’ll take some credit for the selections and where they’re placed! That said, if I had to choose my own line, I’d go with the final line: Our work here is not done.  At the risk of sounding overly dramatic (or just quintessentially Boricua!), that line comes with the cumulative weight of not only 33 poems but also 500 years of (de)colonial history. If you could organize a reading with any writers living or dead, who would be in the lineup? Where would you host the event? I love this question. And do forgive me if this comes across as coy, but Che Guevara. Fidel famously eulogized Che not as a heroic guerrilla or revolutionary cadre inasmuch as a poet. By that criterion, I’d invite Queen Nanny of the Jamaican marrons, Rosa la Bayamesa of the Cuban mambises, Tupca Amaru of the Inca, and Emiliano Zapata of Mexican glory. The guest of honor would, however, be Toussaint L’Ouverture, that world-historic Haitian revolutionary, and the event would take place outside the frigid Fort-de-Joux prison in France where Toussaint was left to die, his remains unceremoniously and secretly buried.  I’d like to hear it from their mouths, their poetry, neither mythologized nor demonically caricatured.  Afterwards, we’d have a Catholic priest and Vodou priestess officiate Toussaint’s last rites and burial. Che, whose remains weren’t exhumed and properly buried until the mid-1990s, would give the eulogy. What would they say, in retrospect and in verse? Do you have a new project that you’re working on? Could you tell us a bit about it? Yes, my new project was inspired by the summer of 2020, that ecstatic summer when so many Columbus statues in the US were, as it were, “decommissioned.” Syndrome finishes with what I call an “anti-ekphrastic” poem about that colossal Columbus monument in Puerto Rico, but I feel the need to delve deeper into Columbus (counter)memorials across history and throughout the Americas. This has taken a fair amount of research. I draw on papal decrees, travelogues, court cases, epic poems, paintings, and sculptures and on indigenous, Black, and populist rebuttals. For this project, documentary poetics, (anti)ekphrasis, odes, and prose poetry are my expressive tactics of choice. With some luck, I’ll finish it this year! Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Tampa, Florida, Éric Morales-Franceschini is a former construction worker, US Army veteran, and community college graduate who now holds a PhD from UC, Berkeley and is Associate Professor of English and Latin American Studies at the University of Georgia. He is author of the chapbook Autopsy of a Fall (Newfound 2021), winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and the scholarly study The Epic of Cuba Libre: The Mambí, Mythopoetics, and Liberation (University of Virginia Press, 2022), winner of the MLA’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize.  Syndrome, selected by Juan Felipe Herrera for the 2022 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, is his debut full-length collection.

Bochica by Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro | ISBN: 9781668062579 | Atria/Primero Sueño Press | May 2025 “Antonia was surprised to feel an odd flash of excitement washing over her. Could she reinstate the equilibrium and fulfill the destiny Estela was too weak to realize? Finally have a role in this town besides babysitting girls at the escuela? . . . But what would I owe the house in exchange for my freedom? ” — Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro, Bochica Journalist Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro’s debut novel Bochica follows Antonia, a young woman whose parents built a house on sacred land to protect it, as she investigates the hauntings of her past: her mother’s death, the house now transformed into a hotel, and the spirits that bind them together and bind Antonia to a fate she didn’t know was hers. Rife with commentary about colonialism, women, ambition, and power, this debut novel draws from Colombian history to tell a story whose themes are ever relevant today. Brittany Torres Rivera (BTR): Can you talk about how you approached the editorial process with Bochica  and how similar or different that was from working on a piece of journalism? Are there things that you brought from your professional experience into this new genre? Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro (CFC): As a journalist, I have to research a lot and read a lot. That’s the skill that I used the most for Bochica because it's not a historical fiction novel, but I did have to do a lot of research so the reader has a backdrop of what was going on in Colombia in the 1930s.  When you go to journalism school, you also have really tight deadlines. You have to create things overnight and you have to be used to working under pressure, which is something that really helps in publishing We authors, have deadlines, but sometimes we don't know how to manage our time because they tell us, You can turn this in in two months  and you're like,  This is great, of course I'm gonna have time , but then the day comes and you're like, Oh my god, I still I have, a hundred pages left . So being able to work under that pressure of looming deadlines and knowing how to balance my time doing other things, that's something that I brought from my experience as a journalist. Being able to handle critique is also a key one. Writing is such a personal thing and you put so much of yourself on the page, whether that's intentional or not. It's hard because you want to be the kind of person who gets things right the first time around. But even established writers and people who are super successful are still getting feedback, they still have to do edits, they still have to improve. I allow myself to feel whatever it is that I'm feeling and then I move on. It's hard getting feedback, but at the end of the day it's for the best and it's still a negotiation. It's not like the editor is telling you, You have to do this, or else we won't publish the book . It's more of a dialogue; Maybe what you're telling me is right, there's something wrong with the book. But maybe the thing that you're suggesting is not the way that I want to go about it. And then we start a conversation. BTR: I appreciate that perspective. Sometimes the solution the editor is offering is not the right one for the book. Could you talk about a big piece of feedback that you had to process or some suggestion that ended up not being the right suggestion for this book? CFC: A big one was Antonia's mother’s journals. They weren't there when we sold the book, and we were on the last round of developmental edits and there were things we still wanted to address, but we didn't know how to go about it. I think we had like a month left to do line edits and then it was up to production. I came up with the idea and then I was like, Maybe I shot myself in the foot , because my editor was like, Yes, that's a great idea, but you're going to have to do it in like five days . So it was really hard. I want to do this, I know it's the best thing that I can do for the book right now, but I only have a month to come up with these journal entries, and not only come up with them, but integrate them into the story. It was a different voice, a different style, and it was hard, but in hindsight, those are my favorite parts in the book. BTR: Speaking of those journals, Antonia has a reputation as the daughter of Estela and as an educated and unmarried woman, which is frowned upon in the story. People like Madre Asuncion make her aware that her reputation needs to be saved. On the other side of that, Estela is motivated by her own  power; She tried to have someone else inherit the role of Lideresa when she questioned her daughter's ability to take that on. Can you talk a little bit about the complex relationships here between reputation, legacy, and power in this novel?  CFC: Whenever people talk about Bochica , it's a Gothic horror book. But at its core, I think it's more about women trying to navigate the world a hundred years ago, and in a very Catholic and conservative society like Colombia. Antonia doesn't really grow up Catholic. Her mom has these views about the world that may or may not resonate with everyone else. And her father goes with whatever her mom does, he’s sort of worshiping her. So Antonia gets kicked out of Catholic school because of her mother's beliefs, and then she is reluctantly drawn back into this world because she needs a job that helps her pay bills because her dad is sick. She's navigating these spaces as a woman who's ahead of her time and has a different view of the world. She’s also resentful of any form of religion, whether that is the cult her mom was part of or religion and how it treats women. She’s navigating these spaces while trying to gain some sort of control over herself and her life. And of course, that's not an easy thing. We not only see that through Antonia, but also through her mother and through Doña Pereira, who is one of the antagonists of the story. But Doña Pereira is also a victim of this same system, she's also trying to find control of herself and of her life, trying to gain some sort of power, which is how the cult came to be in the first place: To what lengths is this group of women willing to go to get some sort of control when women had everything but control and autonomy? I wanted to explore that and how horrific it is to not have control over yourself, over your life, which is the most basic thing a person can have. BTR: That definitely comes across, even in the way that Antonia thinks about her life; Her perspective is disenfranchised, but she has this desire to move up. Antonia, Alejandro, and León all bear the weight of their mother's actions to strikingly different outcomes. This implies a matriarchal structure, but Antonia is constantly railing against the limitations imposed upon her by a patriarchal society. So, can you describe the hard and soft power of men and women in 1930s Colombia and the different spheres, whether legal, social, or spiritual, in which these powers are wielded? CFC: Women’s power was pretty much nonnonexistent, at least in Colombia. We didn't have any women in any sort of position of power in politics or in society. Women weren't even allowed to go to university. Antonia complains about it a lot throughout the book. It's like you were meant to be a daughter, a wife, and if you weren't lucky enough to secure your husband, then maybe you became a nun and that was it. You were an object that people would use. So women were trying to find this basis where they could gain some sort of control and that's where the cult came. In El salto del Tequendama, there was a lot of talk about witchcraft, and I found a lot of registries of people saying that there were women that came in the witching hours and locals tried to get rid of them because it was really bad for the hotel’s reputation. The hotel was gaining a lot of importance around the country. So that's how the cult came to be for me; there needed to be a device for me to start this conversation about women trying to find these spaces where they could feel some sort of control over anything.  With men in the book, I feel like they are victims. We see it with León, with how the book ends especially, and I didn't do it intentionally. With Alejandro, I wanted Antonia to have someone she could trust and someone who knew more than she did. Because you really don't know if she's seeing things, remembering things, if it's all in her head. Doña Pereira was the woman in power in that family. But that was not really something that happened in Colombia. It was always a man taking charge of everything, so I needed León to be her puppet. Everyone knew she was in control, but he was the face of the family. I think the men are a response to what I needed for these women, and telling their story more than it was me trying to make them the victims. BTR: I was really intrigued by the colonial overtones in Estela and Ricardo’s treatment of the Muiscas’ land. Antonia’s parents have this combination of good intentions and ambition (because Estela admits that she wanted that power) that leads them to take land that does not belong to them. In the end, Antonia has to destroy the symbol of that action, the house, to restore order. We often see the Spanish or the English depicted as colonizers. Can you talk about the decision to make Colombians themselves the perpetrators of colonialism within their country? CFC: In Latin America, we believe that we've been colonized, but that we're not necessarily colonizers. I feel like colonialism is very much a modern thing, it still happens with us, and it happens with these places that are not meant to be protected, invaded, or saved in some sort of way. The house is very much real. I made the story up, but a lot of the things are real. There was this architect who wanted to build a house for his wife, and they ended up not living there. Then it became a hotel, this very touristic place and a place for aristocrats in Colombia in the 1940s and 1950s until it was shut down and abandoned in the late 1950s. People want to live outside of cities and take land that has some sort of significance for indigenous cultures. And people don't acknowledge that, they just see it as a beautiful place. But what is that beautiful place? Is it hiding a legacy of bloodshed? There's a point in the book where I say something like, The beauty is a good disguise for bad things . And it is. We make up excuses like,  This place needs saving or restoring or it needs to be taken care of . Which is why the book ends the way it ends. People read the ending and they're like, But the house is still there! And I’m like, Maybe it shouldn't be .  Antonia realizes that, even though Estela wanted to protect the place, it was almost like an altar to herself, so it's disrespectful. That’s something I want people to take away from the book. It's not that the place itself was haunted necessarily. It was us who haunted the place and who have been haunting places that should have been left alone. When she burns down the house, you see this thing that's forming in the flames like a monster being killed off. That's the monster of colonization. That's what I wanted the book to end on. Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro is a Colombian author of genre bending speculative fiction based in Bogotá, Colombia. She is the author of Bochica , a Latin American gothic horror novel pitched as Mexican Gothic meets The Shining . She’s always been passionate about stories, whether her own, fictional or not, or those that belong to others. Her work is fueled by curiosity, her love of history and the supernatural, and the desire to give voice to traditionally marginalized perspectives. When she’s not writing, she can be found sipping black coffee, puzzling, and listening to audiobooks. Find out more at CarolinaFlorezAuthor.com . Brittany Torres Rivera  is a bilingual, Puerto Rican writer. She graduated from Florida International University with a BA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. Brittany is an alumna of the Fulbright Program and currently works as an Editorial and Administrative Assistant at Graywolf Press.

Colson | Washington Writers' Publishing House | May 16, 2024 | ISBN: 978194155139 Entrevista en español Interview

Buy: Consider the Rooster by Oliver Baez Bendorf | Nightboat Books| September 10, 2024 | ISBN: 9781643622385 What are some key themes present in your book? Consider the Rooster explores nature, nurture, rebellion, and transformation within the context of queer ecological thought. It’s about searching for a sense of home and self in a fraught world, amidst the impacts of colonialism, capitalism, and transphobia. At the same time, I wanted to portray a vision where, despite systemic violence and environmental peril, joy persists… expression persists… care persists. The poems dwell in the interconnectedness of all living things, as a source of guidance and strength. They also navigate the necessity of resistance and the continuous path of becoming. I hope the book encourages readers to honor not only their own neighborhood rooster, but also the rooster within. Can you describe the environment(s) where you wrote your book? I wrote Consider the Rooster in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on the native land of the Potawatomi people. My writing environment included an ever-evolving garden, where I grew a wildflower meadow and kept chickens. The crowing of my pet rooster, Walter, woke something up in me, inspiring the book’s themes. This period was also pandemic quarantine, widespread demonstrations against police brutality, and major societal upheaval. Complaints on the basis of the city's stringent grass height regulations and the rooster added to the tension. That summer of CantoMundo teach-in’s (virtual, of course) inspired me and raised my consciousness. These experiences, along with my academic work and the broader political dumpster fire, shaped what became this book’s awakening to alternatives. Writing from that contentious yet blooming environment allowed me to go deeply into these questions of peace and belonging– who is permitted such things, and where, and at what (whose) cost? The book mirrors the perpetual motion that I’ve come to know as one characteristic of trans life under the United States now as we seek ever safer ground. What’s your favorite line(s) from your book? Here are a few of my favorite lines: “When the song crashed into glass as invisible waves / at last I began to vibrate.” (from “Becoming Particulate”) “I step out / to the deck in my trans masc robe / because in the end, no one will / remember. All that I’ve named / has a life outside of me.” (from “All I Have is the Woods Inside My Head”) “Who reminds all in earshot that like it or not another day has come and gone.” (from the title poem, “Consider the Rooster”) “I’m done being good!” (from the poem “Michigan”) Outside of writing, what are some of your passions or hobbies? When I’m not writing, I love drawing, painting, playing basketball, watching basketball, talking about basketball, and doing jigsaw puzzles. I find solace and inspiration in colors, shapes, patterns, statistics, the stories behind statistics, making, and movement. Going for walks is another favorite activity, as it gets me fresh air and helps create a rhythm for things to happen. I also love catching up on the group chat with my coven. How did you get into writing? Can you pinpoint a memory where it all began for you? Born and raised in Iowa City, it could be in the water. My parents brought my sister and I to the public library frequently, and I was allowed to check out as many books as I could personally carry. I clutched towering stacks of them, from comics to chapter books. Also, I was a young keeper of sketchbooks, which taught me early the pleasure of keeping a notebook. I loved to draw, especially haunted houses. More than anything specific I drew, it was this practice of turning toward the page that began it for me. Reading was my other true friend. That and basketball. Have I changed at all? I love rhythm and repetition on a visceral level. So, yes, poetry sings to me. Even now though, I go in and out of writing. Language sometimes moves away from me and comes back when it wants to. So it is almost like I’m beginning again all the time. What are you currently reading? I’m currently reading Have You Been Long Enough at Table by Leslie Sainz, which recently was awarded the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award. It’s an immersive, insightful exploration of what it means to be a Cuban American woman. As a collection of poems, it stands out for me because of its resonant voice and innovative forms. A few additional books I’ve been keeping nearby recently: Faltas by Cecilia Gentili, Poem Bitten By a Man by Brian Teare, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return by CAConrad, Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear by Mosab Abu Toha, and Song of My Softening by Omotara James. Do you have a new project that you’re working on? Could you tell us a bit about it? I’m over the moon that Consider the Rooster is coming out this September. This book is an offering to the idea that we can transform the landscapes of our lives into the ones we dream about. I'm excited to learn about how readers connect with its poems. Looking ahead, I’m working on a manuscript tentatively titled what to do w/ this freedom. This collection asks what it truly means to be free. Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of Consider the Rooster, forthcoming from Nightboat Books in September 2024, and two previous collections of poems: Advantages of Being Evergreen and The Spectral Wilderness. He has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Publishing Triangle, CantoMundo, Lambda Literary, Vermont Studio Center, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His poems have been featured across various anthologies including Best American Poetry, Latino Poetry: A New Anthology, and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. Born and raised in Iowa, he now lives along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, in Colorado.

Archive of Unknown Universes by Ruben Reyes Jr. | ISBN: 9780063336315 | Pub date: July 01, 2025 | Mariner Books | Pages: 288 “Truthfully, it didn't matter what the device might tell her. The future would be winding and perilous, no matter which fork she followed. Ana would have to live with her choices.”—Ruben Reyes Jr., Archive of Unknown Universes In his first novel, Ruben Reyes Jr. writes about the Salvadoran Civil War from the perspectives of revolutionaries and their children. But in this world, Defractors, devices which reveal scenes from the viewer’s alternate futures, complicate the stories by revealing to both the characters and to the reader the generational impacts of war, trauma, and societal oppression. Brittany Torres Rivera (BTR): Your first book, There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven , is a collection of short stories. Can you talk about how you approached the editorial process with Archive of Unknown Universes , and how similar or different that was from working on your debut? Did anything surprise you? Ruben Reyes Jr. (RRJ): Writing a novel was very, very hard! With a short story, you can sort of power through a first draft and then revise it. It’s much harder to do that with a novel. So, writing a novel took a lot more patience. The hardest editorial task was figuring out the right structure. The final structure didn’t come until very late in the editorial process, once I’d been working on the novel with my editor. Nothing was too surprising. In general, I find that somewhere, deep in the back of my head, I know what revisions need to be done. The struggle is listening to that impulse, and making the time to make those revisions, even when they’re difficult or time consuming. That was very much the hardest part of the editorial process. BTR: How did you come up with the Defractor? Why not something more straightforward, like a machine that shows the future? How does the multiplicity of futures tie in with key themes in the novel, such as the rupture and instability of revolution?RRJ: I wanted a technology that was believable, but wasn’t too powerful. A device that told the future would be too helpful to the characters. Instead, the Defractor allows characters to project their own insecurities and wishes onto the device, without getting anything tangible or practical information in return. It made for more tension in the novel. “What if” is such a powerful question, whether you’re applying it to the personal or the structural, both of which were at play during the Salvadoran Civil War. At the edge of a revolution or war, there’s a sense of possibility, I have to imagine. BTR: Luis, Domingo, and Ana all have to pry and wonder about their parents’ experiences which, whether for research or self-identity, they feel is a missing piece of their lives. Why do you think the parents are so intent on keeping their pasts a mystery? Why is one generation intent on burying the past while the next is intent on uncovering and understanding it?   RRJ: Before I wrote the novel, I read an article by the sociologist Leisy Abrego that basically argued that because the Salvadoran Civil War was economically and politically denied by the United States, migrants began to deny or underplay the trauma they’d gone through. That’s partially at play for Luis, Domingo, and Ana’s parents. I don’t blame them either—it’s painful to talk about some of the worst things you’ve experienced. But as a young person, I remember wanting to know more about where I came from, and as I became an adult, I became so curious about my parents’ young adulthood. Both parties—those wanting to know, and those who find it difficult to speak of the past—have completely valid points of view, and this makes for some intergenerational conflict. It felt true to life, but was also good for a novel about the long-term effects of trauma.    BTR : The novel opens on Ana and Luis’s relationship, but in another universe, it's Ana and Domingo. Are all the realities as real as the rest?    RRJ: Personally, I don’t think it’s helpful to think of alternate universes or “what-could-have-been,” though I completely understand the allure. Given the chance, I’d probably use the Defractor! But they’re not as real as our world. In the novel, though, they could be as real as our world. That made the Domingo parts so interesting to write—I needed them to feel, to a reader, as real as the world where the Civil War played out as it did in our universe. BTR: When it comes to history, does the first story we're told become the only one we can believe? RRJ: The first version of history we learn is powerful, simply because it’s the first, but there’s definitely ways to complicate the established narrative. That’s why I find revisionist histories, or the contribution of people who’ve been erased or marginalized in the archive, so exciting. BTR: At the end of the novel, Luis, who is resistant to using or relying on Defractors, says “That’s all life is. One decision, then another.” Do you think there is value in reflecting or imagining alternate realities? What purpose (if any) could that serve? RRJ: That’s a central question of the novel, and not one that I’m sure I’ve made my mind up about. I don’t think I completely agree with Luis’s conclusion that life is boiled down to the individual decisions we make. Thinking about alternate realities, or roads not taken, can help someone redirect their life. If they’re not happy with the life they’ve taken, they might take actions that could get them on a path they wished they’d gotten on earlier. So, in that way, it could be helpful, though I can also imagine thousands of ways it could paralyze or lead to fruitless overthinking. Ruben Reyes Jr. is the son of two Salvadoran immigrants. He is a graduate of Harvard College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His debut story collection, There is a Rio Grande in Heaven, was a finalist for The Story Prize and longlisted for the the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and other awards. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and other publications. In 2026, he was named a Forbes 30 under 30. Archive of Unknown Universes is his first novel. Originally from Southern California, he lives in Queens. Brittany Torres Rivera is a bilingual editor and writer. An alumna of the Fulbright Program, she is a contributing editor for Letras Latinas Blog 2 . Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Florida, she is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she is the assistant editor at Graywolf Press. At Graywolf, Torres Rivera works on poetry, fiction, and nonfiction titles, and is especially involved in works in translation from the Spanish.

Buy: Yaguareté White Univ. of Arizona Press Feb. 20, 2024 What living poet/writer had the biggest influence on your book? Rigoberto González. Hands down, full stop. As a writer, teacher, mentor, and friend, Rigo has helped dozens and dozens (hundreds?) of emerging poets find their voice, navigate the business of poetry, and land on their feet. I consider myself lucky to be counted among them. What’s your favorite line(s) from your book? This morning, my favorite lines consist of twelve tiny syllables tucked into a tidy tercet that comprises the shortest poem in the book, “Yuyos”: cashew for good measure cayenne and petunias Yuyos are traditional herbs added to beverages for their medicinal or flavorful qualities. The words “cashew,” “cayenne,” and “petunia” all derive from Tupí, from which contemporary Guaraní evolved. I like to imagine sprinkling each ingredient into a cauldron to make a cacophonous broth of leaves and bark, flowers and language. I hope readers enjoy the concoction, as well. What is your current obsession? Short lines, slant rhymes, couplets, trees, etc. I’ve long been interested in inconsistency, contradiction, and asymmetry. These traits have defined my experiences of Latinidad—as someone who didn’t grow up speaking Spanish or with a Latinx community, but who nevertheless visited Paraguay every few years for months at a time—and it feels unavoidable that I seek these haphazard imbalances in poetry I read and write. This will sound funny, but I’m especially pleased with the Table of Contents for Yaguareté White. The list includes many poems with one or two-word titles, but is then punctuated by these long, gangly titles that sprawl awkwardly across the page. I like that a lot. In life, I’m drawn to stability, security, and predictability. I think my aesthetic preferences counterbalance those risk-averse impulses. I love poems that expand and cinch wildly, or wiggle and zig-zag all over. It feels so wild and fun and free. William Carlos Williams is synonymous with plums. If you had to choose one fruit and one animal/plant/celestial body that would forever remind people of you, what would you choose and why? The fruit is easy, but I’m gonna cheat and choose two: pineapple cut with jalapeño (*technically* fruta tambien). I’m a sucker for heat paired with sweet, like I cannot get enough of it. My preferred spiciness level is “bordering on regret.” On pizza, in Thai food, my salsa, throw peach, mango, or piña in with the hottest pepper you can find. That’s my jam. As for an animal, plant, or celestial body, the jaguar seems like an obvious choice, since it’s both native to Paraguay and an important part of Guaraní cosmology. But I’m gonna go with jurumí, the giant anteater, which makes an appearance in the book. They are so wide and strange looking, but I’ve yet to see one in the wild for real. What role does the poet play in the 21st century? I look around and wonder, rather, what roles don't poets play in the world today? I see so many poets engaged in unique, important work. We lead vital arts organizations, like Ricardo Maldonado at the Academy of American Poets or Jacqueline Balderrama, Norma E. Cantú, Willie Perdomo, and Pablo Miguel Martínez at CantoMundo. We edit major literary publications, like Carmen Giménez at Graywolf or Javier O. Huerta and León Salvatierra at Huizache. We engage literally millions of followers, like Yung Pueblo, Rudy Francisco, and others. We serve our communities in so many ways. Jordan Pérez helps protect children at the nonprofit Safe from Online Sex Abuse (SOSA) and has featured on the TV show Undercover Underage. Kinsale Drake founded the NDN Girls Book Club and has been recognized by Time magazine for her efforts. Antonio de Jesús López is the new Mayor of East Palo Alto. Name another profession with such breathtaking range and diversity of positions available to its practitioners. This is of course not to mention our many roles as teachers, organizers, and activists. As intellectuals and artists. As students and parents, siblings and children. As neighbors and bystanders, as strangers and future friends. In the end, I believe we are caretakers, of language, of each other, of the planet. We have to be. Otherwise, what else is there? Diego Báez is a writer, educator, and abolitionist. He is the author of Yaguareté White (Univ. Arizona, 2024). A recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, the Surge Institute, the Poetry Foundation Incubator for Community-Engaged Poets, and DreamYard’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Diego has served on the boards of the National Book Critics Circle, the International David Foster Wallace Society, and Families Together Cooperative Nursery School. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Freeman's, Poetry Northwest, and Latino Poetry: A New Anthology. Book reviews have appeared at Booklist, Harriet, and The Boston Globe. Diego lives in Chicago and teaches at the City Colleges.