KC WRITERS

Conjuro

Xanath Caraza's first book-length collection Conjuro (Spellbound), with introduction by Fred Arroyo, is published by Mammoth Publications, a Native-owned literary press. In this tri-lingual text, Caraza combines Spanish, English, and Nahuatl (language of the Aztecs) to create a continuous spell of verse. Caraza's writing derives from her awareness of Indigenous thought: words are tangible objects, not abstractions, and capable of influencing physical reality's web of interactions. The poet's connection to her Indigenous and Mexican heritage energizes her meditations and proclamations, which are set in Veracruz, Spain, Paris, Chicago, and Kansas City, her present home. Caraza is a dynamic performance poet as well as a skilled writer. This debut collection establishes her as a major voice of 21st American letters. This book shows how multiple cultures co-exist for United States immigrants. It is appropriate for young adults, Latin American Studies, Indigenous American Studies, and Midwest U.S. Studies. Xanath Caraza is a traveler, educator, poet and short story writer. Originally from Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, she is a Kansas City resident. She has an M.A. in Romance Languages. She lectures in Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her chapbook Corazon Pintado: Ekphrastic Poems (2012) is from TL Press. She won the 2003 Ediciones Nuevo Espacio international short story contest in Spanish and was a 2008 finalist for the first international John Barry Award. Caraza is an advisory circle member of the Con Tinta literary organization and a former board member of the Latino Writers Collective in Kansas City. Rigoberto Gonzalez writes of Conjuro: "A decisively Amerindian song breathes through the pages of Xanath Caraza's Conjuro, a charitable book of invocation, incantation, lamentation and healing. Caraza's poems are the antidote to our troubled times: they reach toward ancestral spirit and woman-strength, they collect wisdom from the natural and experiential landscapes, they reorient language away from duplicity and back to the "oral traditions of the heart." A truly moving, and spellbinding, debut."

Corazón pintado

In Corazón Pintado: Ekphrastic Poems (2015), traveler, educator, poet and short story writer Xánath Caraza conjures up a collection of ekphrastic poems that summon both the indigenous and African roots of Mexico and take the reader through a trip of visual and rhythmic narratives that descend “into the heart of things”. Pandora lobo estepario Production Press has decided to publish the second edition of Caraza’s, Corazón Pintado: Ekphrastic Poems (2015). This second edition is revised, augmented, and has a foreword by Nuno Júdice. The chapbook is a bilingual edition; most of the translations are by the author in addition to Sandra Kingery and Stephen Holland-Wempe.

Corazón y una lengua peregrina

Corazón y una lengua peregrina es una antología atípica que recoge en sus páginas a escritores de diferentes meridianos literarios. Es un compendio de historias en que la realidad y la ficción se mezclan para crear un mundo alterno que surge de la problemática social de sus protagonistas. La escritora Mexicana, Minerva Margarita Villarreal, en su comentario del libro Corazón y una lengua peregrina, hace una apología de la literatura de habla hispana en los Estados Unidos, y como ella misma menciona, es la defensa de "una cultura permanentemente amenazada con la deportación", añadiendo que la segregación a que se ven sometidos los hispanos indocumentados en los Estados Unidos va acompañada del acoso y el rechazo social, que hace que los inmigrantes se mantengan y experimenten una vida de miedo constante. Por lo tanto, la defensa de la lengua es la defensa de la cultura. De ahí, la importancia del lanzamiento de esta antología, cuando empieza a hacer carrera en este país, un sentimiento atávico de odio hacia los inmigrantes, que promete criminalizar a los individuos simplemente por su lengua, color o religión; todo ello impulsado por personajes de ingrata recordación, pero que revisten gran importancia en una nación que siempre se calificó como tierra de inmigrantes. En este libro hay veintiocho poemas de facturas muy diferentes, pero que a pesar de las barreras generacionales de sus autores, conforman un todo homogéneo que nos revela una preocupación universal por nuestra identidad y nuestros orígenes. También encontramos once cuentos, relatos deslumbrantes, que recrean la vida y la muerte, en un transcurrir de disímiles experiencias que nos transportan a la madre tierra. Si bien los poetas de esta antología cuestionan en una reflexión interna y profunda el tipo de sociedad en que vivimos, de igual modo, nos presentan el amor como una consecuencia natural y algunos relatos nos brindan una muestra de brillante humor que nos trae de regreso a la realidad.

Cuentos del Centro

Cuentos del Centro offers not only contemporary stories of migrant workers, growing up with an eccentric mother, and reminiscences of 1960s psychedelic trips but also historical tales when romance and love endured the hardest of the times. The stories in this book range from a funny look at adolescent love and the poignant story of a worker on his way back to Mexico to visit wife and children, afraid they won't know or want him, to a wicked tale of female revenge on a philandering man and the chilling story of a young Latino family taking refuge at a stranger's farm to sit out a possible tornado.

Disclosure: Confessions of a Queer in Crisis

Your disorders became mine, when I started to carry your guilt and shame. One day I woke up and decided to decorate the room with the salty tears I shed for you. I painted the walls with your weaknesses, so I could remind myself that I could survive without you. I planted flowers with seeds of our leftover lust, so one day I could harvest passion again. I asked Mother Earth to let me forget; I offered my disorders to her, and she caress me to sleep. -Our Room of Memories What happens after a relationship ends? what happens when you are not ready to start again and you do anyways? Disclosure it's a journey. Its confessions seek to explore how race and physical appearances fit into the modern gay world and the difficulties of navigating that world as a newly single queer person.

Lo Que Trae La Marea / What the Tide Brings

Fiction. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Steven Holland-Wempe, Sandra Kingery, and the author. "This debut collection is amazing. The finesse of the storytelling is a pleasure on every page. The importance of immigrant issues becomes not a political statement so much as an epic story of all peoples' survival. Although the stories are not linked and take place in various geographies—China, Europe, the United States, and Mexico—still, the continuity remains with the heroine figure. She is a woman who travels through miseries, between the worlds of the living and the spirits. La Llorona's shadow casts a spell on these stories, where loss occurs, but the natural world offers solace, as well as unexpected beauties. This is a book of songs as well as myths."—Denise Low-Weso

Ocelocihuatl

Poetry. Translated from the Spanish by Sandra Kingery. Bilingual Edition. "Come on this journey, brave the violence in Mexico, in Bosnia, in the U.S. Don't stop. Move through the ancient and mythical, tread the mountains and valleys of the natural world, let the seas swirl at your ankles, follow the jungle trail of the tenacious Ocelocíhuatl, the jaguar-woman, with each step pulsing with the unfaltering rhythms and patterns that mark these poems. Caraza's words cast a spell, seep under our skin, into our bellies and hearts, and remind us that poetry is how we survive."—Donna Miscolta

Primera Página

'This first anthology, Primera Pagina, by the Latino Writers Collective, is a breath of fresh air, '' writes Virgil Suarez. Francisco Aragon writes, ''Primera Pagina is more than a book, more than an anthology. It s a community one borne of community-building in the best sense of the term.'' And as Rane Arroyo writes in his preface, ''How might Latino poets living in the Midwest differ from those writing and living in other parts of our country? Read these poets for that answer.''"

The Paradox of Latina Religious Leadership in the Catholic Church

Religion and social action is both empowering and limiting for women. This study shows the Guadalupanas' awareness of themselves as agents for change and their difficulties in understanding and maintaining their limited gendered roles within church and community.

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