Contemporaries Essays

Remembrance, as it works through the body, moves in shapes and sensations. Remembrance can be an ache, a tickle, a warmth, a cringe, a sigh; it can end up with…

Late in June 2019, like many others worldwide, I viewed, aghast, the photograph of the drowned bodies of 26-year-old Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria….

Like Xiomara, the teenage protagonist of Elizabeth Acevedo’s poetry novel The Poet X, I was always afraid of getting disciplina — of getting caught up and revealed as an imposter…

I Natalie Diaz writes, “In my Mojave culture, many of our songs are maps.” Diaz does not mean this in the sense of a settler colonial map. They do not…

It has been over three years since forty-nine people were murdered at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Public attention has waned. But for certain communities, it is impossible…

In her monograph, Boricua Literature, Lisa Sánchez González argues that in the face of national, colonial, and institutional erasure, Boricuas — the Taíno-derived demonym for Puerto Ricans — find themselves…

Among scholars and teachers of Latina/o/x literature, it has become commonplace in recent years to speak about the vitality of poetry, which has long been subordinated to narrative in research…