Somos en escrito Literary Foundation Press has been working hard. We have two books that will be out soon and two anthologies that will be out this year. Our Grandfathers Were Braceros First we have a dual language book on the Bracero Program called Our Grandfathers Were Braceros. The authors collected many interviews, research and witness the fact that many Braceros were never paid, however much their labor was critical to the war effort of the USA during WWII. These Braceros still await their remuneration by the USA government, more than 50 years past due. Keep your eye out for the accompanying music honoring the Braceros by coauthor Rosa Martha Zárate Macias. Our Grandfathers Were Braceros will be released soon! Death Song of the Dragón ChicxulubMichael Sedano of La Bloga says "There’s lots of reasons to be eager, I’ll focus on three: Death Song of the Dragón Chicxulub is a rare Chicanocentric fantasy novel. Death Song does some teaching. Chickxulub brings lots of fun." Death Song of the Dragón Chicxulub by R. Ch. Garcia is a New Adult book As Sentinel of a pre-Hispanic legacy, Tomás Chaneco has trained warriors to defeat the mysterious, eons-old creature, La Muerte Blanca. But never has the chosen one been a too-young americano. To complete his duties, the shaman-storyteller Tomás must challenge and upset Miguel's entire worldview, with methods as powerful as Otherworld magic, and guide the young man in transforming himself into a fit Slayer. The battle for Miguel's soul carries him from switchblade-fights in Chicano cantinas; to Taos art galas where the rich court the naïve and native; Hispanic ghost towns hiding intimate secrets; Otherworld magic on Sangre de Cristos cliffs and in Mexico City's urban jungles; battles deep in the sewers of the ancient capital Tenochtítlan where legends are buried in Náhuatl codices; and to the bottom of sacrificial, Maya cenote wells for the final fantastical battle. A self-aware Miguel emerges, his crisis of disillusionment resolved, composed in his own corrido ballad. Reminiscent of Zorba and The Teachings of Don Juan, more than just "ethnic fiction" aimed at that audience, nor simply genre fantasy, Death Song of the Dragón Chicxulub owes its birth to paths open by Rudy Anaya and will give readers a whirlwind of a "dragon fantasy." See the sketch of the upcoming cover below. Death Song of the Dragón Chicxulub is targeted to be released in June. Two AnthologiesOur first upcoming anthology is Nuestra Realidad Creativa / Our Creative Reality. A collection of nonfiction writing by US Indigenous-Hispanic writers including Maria Nieto, Kathleen Alcalá, Carlota Caulfield, Carmen Baca, Ernest Hogan, Rosa Martha Villarreal, Juan Alvarado, Vanessa Caraveo, Norma Burgos-Vázquez, Victoria Orozco, Nise Guzman, M.M. Olivas, Edel Romay, Alvaro Ramirez, David Vela and Renee Galvan. This collection of memoir, scholarship and thought is intended to offer our diverse communities' reality to combat the widely spread violent or paternalistic fantasies about us.
Our second upcoming anthology is El Porvenir, Ya! Citlalzazanilli Mexicatl: A Chicano Science Fiction Anthology. Established and upcoming Mexican American writers of Science-Fiction and Fantasy come together in one place to offer visions of raza futures and indigenous otherworlds. Included works by Martin Hill Ortiz, Carmen Baca, Frank Lechuga, Lizz Huerta, Kathleen Alcalá, Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita, Pedro Iniguez, Rosa Martha Villarreal, R. Ch. Garcia, Nicholas Belardes, Ricardo Tavarez, Ernest Hogan, Michelle Robles Wallace, Scott Russell Duncan, Rios de La Luz, and Mario Acevedo. Check back for more information on these upcoming anthologies. Somos en escrito Editors.
0 Comments
Meet El PopoYou might have seen on our site and social media that we have a new logo! We like to call the Mexica scribe the logo is based upon "El Popo". Below you can see the version for the Somos en escrito Literary Press. As you can see in the new logo, the speaking glyphs are being typed and shown on the screen, literally "somos en escrito," we are written, our name and mission for US Indigenous and Hispanic peoples. Somos en escrito Editors.
Facebook Live Interview March 5thJoin us Friday, March 5th at 5pm PST / 8pm Eastern on Facebook live where Somos en escrito will interview Sasha Reiter on his latest book, Sensory Overload. Following the English language interview, Sasha and the Spanish translator of the book, Pedro Granados, will perform selected bilingual poems with a few words from publisher Marisa Russo. If you have problems with seeing the video at the Facebook event above, check our Somos en escrito Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/somosenescrito/. We will also post the video after the interview in our Interview / Entrevista Section. Sasha Reiter was born in New York City in 1996. He grew up in the Bronx, where as the son of an Argentinian father and a Peruvian mother, he experiended first hand the metaphorical otherness of being both Latino and Jewish. He received his B.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing from Binghamton University (2018). He spent a semester in London studying English history and culture. He has published one collection of poems: Choreographed in Uniform Distress/Coreografiados en uniforme zozobra (New York: Artepoética Press, 1st edition, 2018; and Lima: Grupo Editorial Amotape, 2nd edition, 2018). His poetry has been published in English and in translation into Korean and Spanish in Multilingual Anthology: TheAmericas Poetry Festival of New York 2018; Korean Expatriate Literature (Santa Fe Springs, CA, 2019), Sol Negro (Lima, 2018), Hawansuyo (New York, 2018), Letralia (Caracas, 2018), ViceVersa (New York, 2018), and Pluma y Tintero, (Madrid, 2018). His poetry will also appear in Yale Club Poets Anthology (2020). He has translated into English The Gaze/La Mirada, a collection of poems by Pedro Granados, published as part of Amerindians/Amerindios (New York: Artepoética Press, 2020), Identity Flight/Vuelo de identidad (a collection of poems by Oscar Limache, to be published by Grupo Editorial Amotape, Lima, 2020), and Dream of Insomnia/Sueño del insomnio, a collection of poems by Isaac Goldemberg, to be published by Paserios Ediciones, 2021. Pedro Granados is a poet and novelist born in Lima, Peru, in 1955. He has lived in the United States, Europe and the Caribbean. Presently, he lives in his native country, where he is a professor at the University of San Marcos. He received his Bachelor degree at Catholic University of Peru; his Masters (Hispanic Studies) at Brown University, and his Doctorate (Hispanic Language and Literature) at Boston University. He has published the following collections of poetry: Sin motivo aparente (1978), Juego de manos (1984), Al filo del reglamento (1985), Vía expresa (1986), El muro de las memorias (1989), El fuego que no es el sol (1993), El corazón y la escritura (1996), Lo penúltimo (1998), Desde el mas allá 2002), Poemas en hucha (2012), Soledad impura (2014), Activado (2015), Amerindios/Amerindians (2020) and La mirada (2020). His poetry has been collected in two volumes: Al filo del reglamento I (2006) and Al filo del reglamento II (2020). In 1994, he received the I Ciudad de Medellín Latin American Poetry Award. Also, he has published six novels: Prepucio carmesí, Un chin de amor, Una ola rompe, En tiempo real, Boston Angels and Poeta sin enchufe. Literary criticism: Poéticas y utopías en la poesía de César Vallejo, Trilce/Teatro: guión, personajes y público, which was awarded the Mario González Prize de la Associação Brasileira de Hispanistas (2016). He has published essays in the following journals: Anales Galdosianos, Crítica, INTI, Alforja, Lexis, Variaciones Borges, Galaxia, etc. He is the founder and present president of Vallejo sin Fronteras Instituto (VASINFIN).
2020 brought new events and challenges to us all. The lockdown happened just as we became a press and Zoom became our primary means of communicating. We had many wonderful interviews with authors such as Ivan Argüelles, Ernest Hogan, Rios de la Luz and Sasha Reiter. We hosted a panel and performance for Bay Area events: LitCrawl and Weekend of Words. Many of the things we planned last year will come to fruition this year. We hope you are as excited about them as all of us. Advances we made in 2020Somos en escrito Press launched Last year, we launched our publishing arm, Somos en escrito Literary Foundation Press, with three books. The first, Insurgent Aztlán, by Ernesto Todd Mireles, reveals the relationship between social political insurgent theory and Xicano literature, film and myth. He makes a powerful case for addressing the decades-long decline of Mexican American identity. The book won second place in the International Latino Book Awards. In our second book, Theorizing César Chávez, author Armando Arias proposes how the teaching of the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) can be improved for Chicano and Latino students. Looking through the eyes of the famed union organizer, Arias suggests methods that could result in scientific solutions for social justice, economic and environmental problems. Theorizing César Chávez won honorable mention in the International Latino Book Awards. Two other books were released toward the end of 2020: Postcards from a PostMexican by Álvaro Ramírez, which lays out the transnationalization occurring within and between the U.S. and Mexico, and Undesirable Race and Remembrance by Robert René Galván, which portrays the legacy of resilience among his family members who survived and thrived despite years of following the migrant stream to make a living. In 2021, we intend to seek out news works which provide a venue for Mexican American and Latino writers which reflect the lives and aspirations of these, our communities. Our readers, our community, may share in the pride we feel in our publishing venture. Visit our books for purchasing information. Chicano Sci-fi Panel on Speculative Existence The half-hour we at Somos en escrito were allowed for a panel discussion at Weekend of Words in May was prelude to an hour-long session we continued with the panelists: Ernest Hogan, Rios de la Luz, Rudy Ch. Garcia, Kathleen Alcalá and David Bowles, with S.e.e. editors Armando Rendón and Scott Duncan-Fernandez as moderators. Topics ranged from Chicano Sci-fi books, the use of Spanish in publishing, Tejas, Magical Realism, ethnic heritage, and upcoming books by the writers. Listen into the discussion here. Extra-fiction contest was put on hold The 2020 Extra-Fiction contest had few entries compared to our first two years of the contest…it seems the world of 2020 was too apocalyptic in reality and the imagination suffered for it. The Extra-Fiction contest will be back in Fall 2021 and we will be honored to have Ernest Hogan, the accomplished father of Chicano Sci-fi, once more as judge. Our YouTube Channel We have been building the Somos en escrito YouTube channel in 2020. Our intention is to create a repository of Indigenous and Latino literary performance and interviews. We encourage authors who submit to our magazine to submit a video of their reading their work or arranging a virtual videos, but they aren’t required, these video performances are treated as video submissions for the channel. We invite all poets, performance artists, writers, and storytellers to submit your videos to editors@somosenscrito.com. Ventures in the works for 2021To Tell the Whole Truth series on state violence against Mexican Americans We started our series on violence against the Mexican American community “To Tell the Whole Truth” with “Reflections of violence in a pool of blood” by Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez. We will resume the portrayals of that legacy through essays, book excerpts, poems and various works of scholarship. We invite the submission of family histories or memoirs especially written memoirs, video discussions, about this history of violence. Send submissions to editors@somosenescrito.com. New Books Coming! We are excited for the books lined up for 2021: Our Grandfathers Were Braceros…And we too will recount testimonies about the experiences of the Braceros, many of whom are still seeking redress for having been robbed of their pay by both the U.S. and Mexico. Death Song of the Dragón Chicxulub by R.Ch. Garcia, which can be described as Carlos Castaneda meets Harry Potter, is a modern New Adult fantasy book in which an Irish American boy discovers truths about his identity and powers, as well as his own limits. We have a Chicano Sci-fi anthology in the works featuring new stories from writers such as Kathleen Alcalá, Rios de La Luz, Rosa Martha Villarreal, Rosaura Sánchez, Beatrice Pita, Ernesto Hogan, Pedro Iniguez, and others. Another upcoming anthology is Nuestra Realidad Creativa / Our Creative Reality, a nonfiction Latina/o/x anthology meant to show the beautiful reality of our thought and experiences. Somos en escrito online and in downloadable e-issues We are working on e-publishing Somos en escrito into two issues a year, a Spring and Winter starting with Spring and Winter 2020. Love our literature Our goal is to support the literature, writers and communities we love that are Indigenous and Latino, themes and topics as well as writers that are often glossed over and undervalued by the big publishing conglomerates. These stories help form notions of ourselves that dispel the distortion and destruction by the mainstream media. Spread the word about Somos en escrito Magazine and Somos en escrito Literary Foundation Press. You can help us in our mission to grow these literatures by following us on social media and our YouTube channel and by signing up for our newsletter. Our magazine and Press have high goals, enhancing our visibility and honoring our diverse Indigenous and Latino communities. Somos en escrito is thirsty for these stories, like many of you. They fill in the spaces we don’t always know were there, inspire us to possibilities of being and growth we had been blocked from imagining. If you feel this way about Indigenous American and Latino literature, read and support us. We are your place for literature in 2021. With deep and sincere thanks for reading Somos en escrito and here is to the best 2021 for us all. Armando Rendón, Executive Editor
Scott Duncan-Fernandez, Senior Editor Jenny Irizary, Poetry Editor We Shall Return!The mala onda of 2020 rolled in like icy vampiric Bay Area fog and drained the vitality of the Extra-Fiction Contest, leaving us with a husk.
We did not receive enough submissions to give a fair contest to those intrepid and appreciated few who submitted. Thank you to those writers and we hope you submit next year as well. Somos en escrito also appreciates the judge Ernest Hogan, the father, godfather, all father of Chicano Sci-fi whose work inspires us all to dare the "recombocultural" visions that he creates and makes seem natural and vital. He has been the perfect judge for this contest and we look forward to more collaborations. Check out Ernest Hogan's blog Mondo Ernesto. His column at La Bloga, Chicanonautica. And read his books! Cortez on Jupiter, High Aztech, and Smoking Mirror Blues all can't be recommended enough for anyone and especially for those interested in Science Fiction. Somos en escrito Foundation Press launches its third book, Postcards from a PostMexican by Álvaro Ramírez A Transformed Mexico Emerges in Provocative Collection of Essays by One of Its Transnational SonsPostcards from a PostMexican peels away the façade of the nationalist, folkloric Old Mexico to reveal a country which each day looks more and more like its salsa-loving, border-sharing wall-building neighbor—the U.S. Author Álvaro Ramírez, the self-defined PostMexican in the title, chronicles the amazing cultural transformation that is taking place in a transnational geographical area that encompasses Mexico and the United States. Ramírez shows that the world as we knew it is disappearing or morphing into another at a dizzying pace in the new millennium, thanks to massive migrations, NAFTA, the Internet, and social media. These socio-economic and technological forces are deluding the unique cultural identities that differentiated us neatly into nations. What is emerging is a hybrid world where Americans set to a large degree the trends, the cultural models that define the inhabitants of both countries. Interestingly, most people are unaware of the changes Mexicans are going through in the postMexican condition until they have a chance to visit either country. American tourists (especially Mexican Americans) are shocked and put off by the heavy presence of American culture (music, movies, sports, clothes, fast food) in Mexico; Mexicans are surprised at the amount of their national culture alive and doing well in the United States (food, mariachis, ballet folklórico, Cinco de Mayo, Día de los Muertos). After witnessing and studying these phenomena for many years, presenting papers at conferences, and teaching many courses on the subject, Ramírez decided to start a blog where he could rant and rave on these matters in a non-academic style, free of jargon, accessible to all readers. In Postcards from a PostMexican, he offers short, lucid analyses of the transnational world in which he lives. The twilight of Mexican nationalism, the relation of Mexico and its migrants, the rise of the NAFTA Generation, Mexican racism and xenophobia, the populism of Donald Trump and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, are but a few of the issues that Ramírez addresses with flair and a good dose of humor, which leaves the reader with an understanding that Mexicanness is not what it used to be. See Postcards from a PostMexican in our Somos en escrito Foundation Press page, get it at Amazon, and follow @PostMexican happenings on its Facebook. Álvaro Ramírez, born in Michoacán, México, of Purépecha origin, migrated with his family to Ohio as an adolescent. A Professor of Literature at various California schools, he has been a Professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Saint Mary’s College (Moraga) since 1993, where he specializes in Spanish Golden Age and Latin American literature, Mexican Film, and Chicano Cultural Studies. His first book, a collection of short stories in Spanish, Los norteados, was a finalist in the 2017 International Latino Book Awards competition. The deadline at the end of the hall......is December 1stOur Extra Fiction Contest requires more...you now have until December to sate its thirst. Please warn all before it is too late.
BEYOND THE USUAL Any unpublished fiction that conveys this extra element is eligible. That means any genre, Spec-Lit, Horror, Sci-fi, Experimental, Magic Realism, Fantasy, Abstract, Slipstream, etc. We seek manuscripts from writers of Indigenous, Mexican, Chicano, Puerto Rican, other Caribbean, Central or South American origin born or living in the U.S. Our judge is Ernest Hogan, Father of Chicano Sci-fi and author of Cortez on Jupiter, High Aztech, and Smoking Mirror Blues. PRIZES First prize is $100. Second and Third Place and two honorary finalists will earn publication and will receive a book donated to Somos en escrito from noted Latino authors. PREVIOUS WINNERS 2019 First Place "El Parbulito" by Gloria Delgado Second Place "A Story of the Fourth Crusade" by Rosa Martha Villarreal Third Place Excerpt from When Corn People Wage War by Tania Romero 2018 (read them here) First Place “Fatherly, dragonly, motherly . . . love, luck and touch” Rudy Ch. García Second Place “The Archivist” Ricardo Tavarez Third Place "Sessions In Augmented Reality" Nicholas Belardes TO SUBMITEmail to somossubmissions@gmail.com with “Extra-Fiction 2020” in the Subject Box. Please format manuscripts in Word format, as .docx or .doc attachments, single-spaced and in 12-point Times New Roman font. Place your name and email address in the upper left hand corner of the first page, and submit a short bio including ethnic background along with an author’s photo in .jpeg format. We look forward to an even more exciting contest than the previous two years. Good luck to all writers. —The Editors of Somos en escrito Magazine Congratulations to Amalia Ortiz for winning the American Book Award in Oral Literature for her book, The Canción Cannibal Cabaret & Other Songs! Kudos to Aztlan Libre Press, the awardee's publisher, and our sister publishing house for Latino literature, based in San Antonio. Purchase the book from them here. To read an excerpt published by Somos en escrito in July 2019, click here. Click here or on the video below to hear the author's acceptance speech (at around 1:20) during the Before Columbus Foundation's 41st Annual American Book Awards. As part of Litcrawl SF 2020, Somos en escrito presents three poets and storytellers featured in Somos en escrito that mix the personal and political and exhibit the best in Latina/o/x writing. Featuring Lucha Corpi, Ivan Argüelles and Fernando Andres Torres. Saturday, October 24, 2020 6:15 - 6:45 p.m. PDT Details on how to watch the reading here Invite friends to the event on Facebook Join the Q&A afterwards at 6:55p.m. here Ivan Argüelles is a Mexican-American innovative poet whose work moves from early Beat and surrealist-influenced forms to later epic-length poems. He received the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award in 1989 as well as the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award in 2010. In 2013, Argüelles received the Before Columbus Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award. For Argüelles the turning point came with his discovery of the poetry of Philip Lamantia. Argüelles writes, "Lamantia's mad, Beat-tinged American idiom surrealism had a very strong impact on me. Both intellectual and uninhibited, this was the dose for me." While Argüelles's early writings were rooted in neo-Beat bohemianism, surrealism, and Chicano culture, in the nineties he developed longer, epic-length forms rooted in Pound's Cantos and Joyce's Finnegans Wake. He eventually returned, after the first decade of the new millennium, to shorter, often elegiac works exemplary of Romantic Modernism. Ars Poetica is a sequence of exquisitely-honed short poems that range widely, though many mourn the death of the poet's celebrated brother, José. Lucha Corpi, an internationally recognized poet, novelist and children's book writer, is the author of the Gloria Damasco Mystery series, which includes Eulogy for a Brown Angel (1992), Cactus Blood (1995), and Death at Solstice (2009). Her first poetry collection, Palabras de mediodía/Noon Words, was reissued by Arte Público Press in 2001. The recipient of numerous awards and citations, she taught in the Oakland Public Schools Neighborhood Centers Program for more than 30 years. Fernando Andres Torres is a short-story writer, poet, and musician. A graduate journalist of San Francisco State University, he contributes to various Bay Area media. He is associate editor and U.S. correspondent for the web magazine Dilemas.cl. and editor of the blog LatinOpen.wordpress.com. Under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, Torres joined the Chilean resistance and in 1975 was arrested by the regime's secret police. In prison, he recited poetry and hand-wrote messages with quotes about optimism and hope to pass among fellow prisoners. Torres is a member of the ExposeFacts Advisory Board, member of the Review Panel of the Intrepid News Fund. As a composer and musician, he has worked with various groups of Latin American music and shared the stage with American artists like Pete Seeger and Holly Near. |
Archives
February 2024
Categories
All
|