National Poetry Slam champion Elizabeth Acevedo is the New York Times bestselling author of The Poet X, the winner of the National Book Award, among other works of fiction and poetry. She’s given TED Talks and has presented her work at such venues as Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center, as well as farther afield in Kosovo, Brussels, and South Africa. The daughter of Dominican immigrants, her writing often reflects her Afro-Latina roots. On her website, Acevedo wrote, “I commit wholeheartedly to the mission that my mother’s stories will not die with her. I believe wholeheartedly telling my own story is an act of love and survival.” About her poem “Atlantis,” she says, “[It] was inspired by the geography of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. When an island is already fighting over resources, what happens when those resources are even further threatened by climate change?” A New York City native, she now makes her home in Washington, DC. (acevedowrites.com)
Samira Ahmed is the New York Times bestselling author of the young adult novels Love, Hate & Other Filters and Internment. She was born in Bombay, India, and raised near Chicago, and her poetry and fiction often draw upon her own encounters with racism and hate crimes. About her poem “On Being American,” she says, “[It was] inspired by my first experience with Islamophobia during the Iran Hostage Crisis. That’s when I first learned that words could be daggers. But I also learned that words can be a balm; they can give us hope; they can let us breathe. And they can voice our resistance.” After receiving her MAT from the University of Chicago, she taught high school English and worked for educational nonprofits, helping to create small high schools in New York City. (samiraahmed.com)
An Iranian American poet, editor, and professor, Kaveh Akbar is the author of the highly acclaimed poetry collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf and the founder of Divedapper, which features interviews with many of today’s prominent poets. Born in Tehran, he was two when his family immigrated to the US. Prayer was a part of his upbringing, and though Akbar didn’t yet understand Arabic he was fascinated by the ritual. In “Kaveh Akbar: How I Found Poetry in Childhood Prayer,” published by Literary Hub, he wrote, “I remember watching my father, the only one of us who was actually raised entirely in Iran, who seemed specifically marked, fluid, holy in these moments. Before I really even understood the point of the praying, I understood that I wanted to be like him—[‘Learning to Pray’] orbits that idea.” (kavehakbar.com)
When Francisco X. Alarcón was a teenager, poetic inspiration came to him through the songs his grandmother sang, and he went on to become a prolific writer for adults as well as children. Born in California and raised in Mexico, he returned to the US for college and graduate school. Not only fluent in English and Spanish, he also spoke Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. His poetry books include Body in Flames/Cuerpo en llamas and Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation, winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. About his poem “I Used to Be Much Much Darker,” he said, “After spending a few months at Stanford University studying as a graduate student, I went home to visit my family in Southern California. Upon seeing me, Mother asked me what had happened to me since I had lost my dark-color complexion. I was really taken by her question, and noticed that, in fact, I was not as ‘dark’ as I used to be.” Alarcón died in 2016.
An award-winning Palestinian American poet, novelist, and clinical psychologist, Hala Alyan is the author of the poetry collections Atrium, Four Cities, Hijra, and The Twenty-Ninth Year, as well as the novel Salt Houses. Born in Illinois, she grew up in various parts of the US and in Kuwait, Lebanon, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates. When her family sought asylum in Oklahoma after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, she was five and didn’t speak English; her poem “Oklahoma” reflects many of her struggles to fit in, when she felt like she didn’t belong anywhere. “I was neither white nor Black nor Mexican, which meant, in the topography of my public elementary school in Oklahoma, that I was landless,” she wrote in Lenny Letter. “I had multiple rituals, verging on the obsessive-compulsive” to “keep the funnel clouds from touching down” and “studied the clouds outside not for faces but for threats.” (halaalyan.com)
Fatimah Asghar is a nationally touring poet, screenwriter, educator, performer, and writer/co-creator of Brown Girls. She is the author of the poetry collections After and If They Come for Us, as well as the co-editor, with Safia Elhillo, of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me. She was born in Massachusetts to Pakistani and Kashmiri immigrant parents who died when she was five, and many of her poems are about the trauma of loss. “Being a part of any kind of diaspora is such a beautifully haunting and strange experience, to kind of constantly be working back toward a place where your family has left, or were exiled from, or can’t go back to . . . That’s a kind of orphaning in its own self,” she told PBS NewsHour. Her writing “came from a really dark place,” but it is also about “having lived through that kind of darkness” and “having been able to construct [poetry] out of trauma . . . I write for the people who come before me and the people who might come after, so that I can honor them and create space for what is to come,” she said in a Prairie Schooner interview. (fatimahasghar.com)
JoAnn Balingit is a poet, educator, arts-in-education advocate, and editor, as well as a surfer who rides a nine-foot-two longboard. A former poet laureate of Delaware, she is a Poetry Out Loud program coordinator and the author of three poetry collections, including, most recently, Words for House Story. She was born in Ohio to a German American mother and a Filipino immigrant father, and she grew up in Florida, the third eldest in a family of twelve children. About her poem “#Sanctuary,” she says, “The day after the 2016 presidential election, I returned to teach at the local high school where I was a visiting poet. Some undocumented students left school that day, upset by a teacher who echoed the president-elect’s August 2016 campaign speech on immigration: ‘We will end the sanctuary cities that have resulted in so many needless deaths . . .’ I wanted to write a poem for those students, to acknowledge their fear and courage.” (joannbalingit.org)
Ellen Bass is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, whose most recent poetry collection, Like a Beggar, was a finalist for several awards, including the Lambda Literary Award and the Northern California Book Award. She co-edited the first major anthology of twentieth-century American women’s poetry, No More Masks!, and co-authored The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse. Her father was born in Russia and came to the US as a child; her mother’s parents emigrated from Lithuania. About writing “Ode to the Heart,” she says, “My father’s story is one that he told a number of times when I was a child. Anti-Semitism and tribalism were facts of life for my parents. In this poem, I tried to inhabit my father’s boyhood experience through the heart that is common to all of us.” (ellenbass.com)
Pseudonymous English author Brian Bilston has been described as “the Poet Laureate of Twitter.” His 2016 collection, You Took the Last Bus Home, features many of the poems he’s shared on social media, and his debut diary-style novel, Diary of a Somebody, combining poetry and fiction, follows his decision “to write a poem every day for a year.” About his poem “Refugees,” which can be read from beginning to end as well as from its last line to its first, Bilston says, “I was struck by how polarized the debates over the refugee crisis had become—how could these tragic stories of displacement, these poor people forced from their homes by war, famine and poverty elicit such diametrically opposed reactions from the rest of the world? I wanted to represent this contrast in a poem somehow. My own sympathies lie very much from the bottom upwards.” (brianbilston.com)
Born in Ireland, Eavan Boland is regarded as an Irish poet, even though she has lived much of her life in the US. The author of nearly twenty poetry collections, as well as prose, including Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time, she is the director of Stanford University’s creative writing program, a member of the Irish Arts Council and the Irish Academy of Letters, and a recipient of the Lannan Award for Poetry and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award. About her beginnings as a poet, Boland said in an interview with HoCoPoLitSo’s The Writer’s Voice, “Every young poet . . . goes through a stage of writing somebody else’s poem . . . Fundamentally, if you learn to write someone else’s poem, it will end up suppressing your own voice.” (creativewriting.stanford.edu/people/eavan-boland)
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello was born in South Korea and adopted as a baby by a family in upstate New York. About her poem “Origin/Adoption,” she says, “It’s strange to wonder what cultural and genetic memories I might carry in my unconscious, and what permissions and rights I have to claim either South Korean or American cultures. [This poem] is a way of trying to talk about that experience and offer solidarity through the complexities of adoption that only other adoptees can recognize.” Cancio-Bello has received poetry fellowships from Kundiman, the Knight Foundation, and the American Translators Association. Her debut poetry collection, Hour of the Ox, won an AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. (marcicalabretta.com)
Poet, essayist, translator, and immigration advocate Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of the poetry collections Cenzontle and Dulce, as well as a memoir. When he was five he crossed the US–Mexico border with his family, settling in California, and he was the first undocumented student to earn an MFA at the University of Michigan. He is also a founding member of the Undocupoets campaign. In an interview with PBS NewsHour, he said, “[Prior to becoming a DACA student] I couldn’t bring myself to talk about being undocumented, what it’s like . . . being a second grader and . . . worrying about state tests, if they ask for a social [security number].” About writing “Field Guide Ending in a Deportation,” a direct response to Trump’s immigration policies and anti-immigrant rhetoric, he told the New York Times, “Now, I feel like I’m giving myself permission . . . Am I enough? When is it going to be enough? . . . When I came undocumented into this country, I wanted to learn English so that I could be considered ‘enough.’ But after this terrible year, it’s been solidified in me that maybe, that’ll never be reached. It’s a very sad poem.” (marcelohernandezcastillo.com)
Marianne Chan, a writer of both poetry and fiction, grew up in Germany and Michigan, and now lives in Florida. She is the poetry editor at Split Lip Magazine and the author of the poetry collection all heathens. About “When the Man at the Party Said He Wanted to Own a Filipino,” Chan says, “When I wrote this poem, I was reading Magellan’s Voyage Around the World, which chronicles the ‘discovery’ of the Philippines by Ferdinand Magellan. This book and the conversation with the man at the party made me think about all the ways in history and in present times that Filipinos have been viewed as something that could be ‘owned’—whether in marriage, as domestic workers, as outsourced labor, or, in the 1500s, as a ‘heathen’ people with resources that could be sold.” (https://www.mariannechan.com)
The author of the poetry chapbook Past Lives, Future Bodies, Kristin Chang is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize in poetry and was a Gregory Djanikian Scholar. She says, “The concept of ‘Domesticity’ reflects not only what it means to be objectified as an ‘other,’ but also explores how immigrant women’s and women of color’s domestic labor is often invisibilized. I wrote this poem as a way of deconstructing the foreign/domestic and masculine-public versus feminine-domestic dichotomies that often erase the stories and voices of immigrant women.” (kristinchang.com)
Leila Chatti is a Tunisian American dual citizen and the author of the poetry collections Ebb and Tunsiya/Amrikiya. In 2017, she was the first North African poet to be shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. Many of her poems explore her own experiences of having two cultures, languages (Arabic and English), and faiths (Muslim and Catholic). “I was eleven years old when the Twin Towers fell and so came of age in the context of a country that despised me . . . That sense of being ‘bad’ and an outsider rooted in me,” she told Adroit Journal. “Tunsiya/Amrikiya arose naturally, out of necessity. 2016 was a brutal, terrifying year to be Arab and Muslim in the United States . . . I like to think that these poems may . . . push back against Islamophobia, though they are not explicitly political; hatred is often the failure to see a stranger as fully human, and in these poems I reveal my full self.” (leilachatti.com)
Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American poet from Los Angeles, whose parents’ stories about the Vietnam War inspired her award-winning debut poetry collection, Split. “My parents . . . clandestinely escaped on a boat soon after the fall of Saigon in 1975 . . . my mom told me she had no choice but to leave,” she told the Best American Poetry APIA Series. “So, who am I? I am my family and my family’s stories . . . I am my father who was drafted into the South Vietnamese Army and fought, an unwilling soldier, for over twelve years. I am my father’s brother and aunt’s children who were gunned down in one great massacre. I am my grandmother’s grief, and also her endurance . . . I am also a girl who was sexually molested repeatedly over the course of eight years . . . I hope that putting my writing out there can help others feel less alone.” (@cathylinhche)
Chen Chen, who was born in Xiamen, China, and grew up in Massachusetts, is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, which received multiple honors and accolades. He is the 2018–2020 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University, and co-edits the Underblong. About his poem “First Light,” featured as part of the #WeComeFromEverything campaign, he wrote on his website, “I’m tired of the dominant immigration narrative, the one that romanticizes the United States as a land of opportunity and fails to recognize the deep sorrow many immigrants confront, leaving a home country—even when it’s a real choice to do so. I’m also tired of what has more recently become the dominant coming-out narrative, the happy tale of full acceptance that marginalizes the experiences of those who aren’t so fortunate to have supportive family. This poem is an attempt to hold heartbreak close.” (chenchenwrites.com)
Franny Choi is a Korean American poet, playwright, teacher, and National Poetry Slam finalist, whose poetry collections include Floating, Brilliant, Gone, Death by Sex Machine, and Soft Science. She’s a Kundiman Fellow, senior news editor for Hyphen, co-host of the podcast VS, and a member of the Dark Noise Collective. Her poem “Choi Jeong Min,” which was written in response to a white poet who gained notoriety for using an Asian pseudonym, is about her own struggles to accept her identity as the daughter of Korean immigrants. In an interview with Adroit Journal, she said, “I grew up thinking it was one of my greatest strengths to not have a Korean accent; I even remember studying the speech patterns of other Korean-American kids so I wouldn’t sound like them . . . I know that in some ways, no matter how perfect my English is . . . I’ll always be seen as someone doing, at best, an extraordinarily good job at emulating a native speaker. But I think it’s a beautiful gift to have grown up with the understanding that all English is broken; all English is breakable. I have no respect for the sanctity of English.” (frannychoi.com)
Jeff Coomer, the author of A Potentially Quite Remarkable Thursday, grew up in the suburbs east of Baltimore. After working for many years in the corporate world, he completed training to be a Tree Steward. About “History Lesson,” he says, “The statement my grandfather made that ends the poem was such a powerful reminder of the difference between his life of struggle and my life of privilege that I could still recall the details of the conversation when I wrote the poem more than thirty years later. I like to think his words made me a more sensitive and humble person as I moved into the adult world of work and family.” (http://www.facebook.com/jeff.coomer.3)
Eduardo C. Corral is the author of the poetry collections Slow Lightning, which won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2012, making him the award’s first Latino recipient, and Guillotine. The son of Mexican immigrants who crossed into Arizona shortly before he was born, he told PBS NewsHour that he hopes his poems will convey what he believes is largely missing from the national conversation about immigrants: “We keep seeing immigrants from Mexico, Central America, as labor force. [We] see them as . . . just physical beings, right? No! Everybody has a mind, a heart, a soul . . . [T]he cerebral, the mental, the emotional . . . gets often lost when we talk about immigration . . .There are days when [I’m] like, ‘What am I doing at the desk? . . . I should be doing something to really mobilize . . . But we do need poets . . . from these kinds of backgrounds, Mexican-Americans, from El Salvador, from Guatemala, telling these stories.” (@eduardoccorral)
Blas Manuel De Luna was born in Tijuana, Mexico, and was raised in California. His poetry collection Bent to the Earth reflects on his experiences working in the agricultural fields while he was growing up, and it was selected as a National Book Critics Circle finalist in 2006. In a profile in Poetry, he said, “I’m not by nature the kind of person who reveals himself, but it just kind of happens in the poems—the willingness to go to the place where you’re revealed, but always in service of the poem, never in a purging kind of way.” (blasmanueldeluna.com)
Safia Elhillo, who once carried a sign at a rally that read “Unapologetic Black Muslim Sudanese American (This Is My Country Too),” has found it difficult to know where she belongs, when her country of birth hasn’t welcomed (and previously banned) her Sudanese family, and she didn’t grow up in Sudan. “[If] my place of origin isn’t home, and my place of birth isn’t home, then what am I supposed to do? Where am I supposed to go? . . . My work has always come out of that space of questioning and discomfort,” she told Ploughshares. Her poems reflect not only her own experiences of displacement and partial belonging, but that of her Sudanese parents’, and of her grandfather’s generation, born in Sudan under the British occupation. Her poetry collection The January Children, which was awarded the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, is dedicated to these “January Children” who were assigned birth years by height and all given the birth date January 1. A recipient of the 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, Elhillo is co-editor, with Fatimah Asghar, of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me. (safia-mafia.com)
As a poet, editor, essayist, and translator, Martín Espada has published almost twenty books, including, among his fourteen poetry collections, the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Republic of Poetry. His groundbreaking book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple, which advocates for social justice, was once banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. Espada’s aim, he told Bill Moyers in an interview, has always been “to speak on behalf of those without an opportunity to be heard.” Political activism is in his blood—his father, Frank Espada, was an acclaimed political activist and documentary photographer who emigrated from Puerto Rico to New York City. In an interview with PBS NewsHour, he said, “To see dignity in those faces where others did not see dignity, to recognize that our struggle as a community was and continues to be a struggle between dignity and indignity, between humanity and dehumanization. That’s what you can do if you’re a photographer or a poet.” Formerly a tenant lawyer for Greater Boston’s Latino community, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2018 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. (martinespada.net)
Tarfia Faizullah is the author of the poetry collections Seam and Registers of Illuminated Villages. She has been honored with three Pushcart Prizes. In 2016, Faizullah was recognized by Harvard Law School as one of “50 Women Inspiring Change.” Her poem “Acolyte” captures her own childhood experience. In an interview with Grist Journal, she said, “I grew up in West Texas in a Bangladeshi Muslim household in which Bangla was the primary language spoken. In the evenings, we prayed Maghrib and ate rice and lentils with our (right) hands, and in the mornings, I would wake up and go to the Episcopalian private school and attend the daily chapel service . . . Each time I went to Bangladesh, it was impossible to convey to my cousins what it was like to be an acolyte. Language has always been a way for me to try to articulate the strange and familiar wonder of both returning to Bangladesh and returning to Texas: those places that are both and neither my homelands. I think there’s such richness in the space between those worlds, even though some days I want to disavow them.” Faizullah is the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan. (tfaizullah.com)
Poet, editor, and nonfiction writer Hafizah Geter was born in Nigeria and immigrated to the US with her family when she was a toddler. The daughter of a Nigerian mother from a Muslim family and an American father raised Southern Baptist in Alabama, her dual cultural heritage inspires much of her writing. In an interview with the New York Times, she said, “Often, people think that for an immigrant, the whole thing is just this big gift that you’re receiving. Of course when you’re leaving a place for a better life it’s a gift, but it becomes such a big cost to the person that’s leaving.” Geter believes that the power of poetry is that it “cannot be controlled, and it’s especially dangerous because it’s a tool used in minority and disenfranchised communities. The very act of speaking up in a world that tries to silence you—especially when you’re coming from a marginalized identity—can actually have life or death consequences.” Geter is a Cave Canem Fellow and an editor at Amazon Publishing’s Little A and Day One. She is at work on a poetry collection and a nonfiction book exploring the intersection of gender, nationality, race, and the human condition. (hafizahgeter.com)
Carlos Andrés Gómez is a “proud Colombiano poet from New York City.” About poetry, he says, “Oftentimes the greatest writing is putting down on paper what you know you shouldn’t write.” In addition to defying any “should” on paper and with his performances at slams, this spoken-word poet has raised over $40,000 to fight HIV/AIDS. Gómez graduated with an MFA from Warren Wilson College. The author of the memoir Man Up: Reimagining Modern Manhood, he’s the winner of the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, including for “Pronounced,” a poem that, as he wrote on the Crab Orchard Review blog, was “inspired by my childhood: growing up feeling pulled between languages, identities, and worlds.” Gómez has performed on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and had a leading role in Spike Lee’s blockbuster film Inside Man. (carloslive.com)
Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, a graduate of Stanford University, is a poet, the author of several books, and an academic. She is the first editor of the pathbreaking Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia. In 2017 Gutiérrez y Muhs received the Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Arts and Sciences from Seattle University, where she is a professor. Her collections of poetry include A Most Improbable Life and The Runaway Poems: A Manual of Love. She wrote her poem “Las Casas Across Nations” in response to the ongoing US–Mexican border crisis, saying, “the border has always been a porous region,” across which her family traveled back and forth for more than one hundred years. (seattleu.edu/artsci/about/faculty-and-staff/gabriella-gutierrez-y-muhs-phd.html)
Born in the Philippines, Janine Joseph immigrated to the US with her family when she was eight. It wasn’t until she received her federal Student Aid Report during her senior year of high school that she learned she wasn’t a citizen, which meant she had to turn down college acceptances and scholarships. Joseph is an active member of Undocupoets, a group that promotes the work of undocumented poets. About writing her debut collection of poems, Driving Without a License, which won the 2014 Kundiman Prize, she said, in an interview with the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, “It was impossible for me to tell a straightforward, linear immigration narrative wherein I easily immigrated, overcame adversity, assimilated, and then achieved the American Dream. Poetry allowed me to approach my story a fragment at a time. More, though it had been a fairly private and personal art and undertaking when I was younger, poetry became a voice and vocation that required no one’s permission or authorization but mine.” She is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at Oklahoma State University. In addition to being a poet, Joseph is a librettist, and her work has been commissioned for the Houston Grand Opera. (janinejoseph.com)
Mohja Kahf was born in Syria and came to the US when she was three. A writer from childhood, she was first published when she was ten and won a poetry contest in high school. She has authored two books of poetry, E-mails from Scheherazad and Hagar Poems; a novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf; and many works of nonfiction, including Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque. In an interview for Medium, she said she is inspired by the “rich heritage of Arab foremothers in poetry, even if, yes, they’re always pulling against how they get marginalized and condescended to.” As a member of the Syrian Nonviolence movement, Kahf works to help Syrians in crisis and to educate Americans about the country of her birth. She told Medium: “I think that activism for human rights, including gender rights, has this built-in impetus that it wants to reach people. It means seeing people’s language and people’s stories as sources for your telling, as muses among your muses.” She’s a professor at the University of Arkansas. (@ProfKahf)
Ilya Kaminsky, who lost most of his hearing when he was four, was born in the former Soviet Union city of Odessa and came to the US as a teenager when his family was granted asylum. He began writing poems in English when his father died a year after their arrival. “I understood right away that it would be impossible for me to write about his death in the Russian language,” he explained in an interview with the Adirondack Review. “I chose English because no one in my family or friends knew it—no one I spoke to could read what I wrote. I myself did not know the language. It was a parallel reality, an insanely beautiful freedom.” His poetry collections Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic demonstrate his love of languages and the ways that they transform us. Once a law clerk for San Francisco Legal Aid and the National Immigration Law Center, Kaminsky currently works as a court-appointed special advocate for orphaned children and teaches English and comparative literature at San Diego State University. (ilyakaminsky.com)
Li-Young Lee was born in Indonesia to Chinese political exiles who had fled China’s turmoil. Persecution followed the family to Indonesia, as well, where his father was charged with crimes against the state and imprisoned. While his family was being taken to a prison colony, they escaped, and were eventually able to obtain asylum in the US. His memoir, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, centers around the upheaval of his early life. Lee’s many poetry collections have received numerous awards and honors, including recognition from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Through writing poetry as a university student, Lee found a way to make the English language his own. In an interview with Image, he said, “The whole enterprise of writing absolutely seems to me like a spiritual practice . . . When you practice an art form, you realize that the poem is a descendent of your psyche, but your psyche, if you pay attention, is a descendent of something else, let’s say the cosmos.”
Joseph O. Legaspi was born in the Philippines and his family immigrated to California when he was twelve. The author of the poetry collections Imago, Threshold, and several chapbooks, he received a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and co-founded Kundiman, a nonprofit organization dedicated to nurturing writers and readers of Asian American literature. In an interview with the Creative Independent, Legaspi said, “My pursuing something creative leads to this amazing brotherhood and sisterhood and siblinghood with creative folks. That’s the best thing about being a creative, because I would say 90% of your friends are creative. They, in turn, bring so much beauty and language and sunlight, and darkness, and drama in your life. You feel alive all the time, having all these people around you. I’m really thankful for it.” (josepholegaspi.wordpress.com)
Ada Limón is the author of five books of poetry, including, most recently, The Carrying, as well as Bright Dead Things, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award in Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of the Year by the New York Times in 2015. Describing her poetry as mostly autobiographical, she told an interviewer from Compose: “I want my poetry to help people recommit to the world we are living in, to the ugly mess and beautiful strangeness of it. I don’t provide any answers in my poems, but I hope to ask the right questions and reveal the right truths that make people feel like they aren’t alone. I’ve said before that the most important words, for me, in poems are the words that aren’t written, the words that say, ‘me too.’” Limón makes her home in Lexington, Kentucky, and is on the faculty of the Queens University of Charlotte low-residency MFA program and the 24Pearl Street online program for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. (adalimon.com)
The author of the poetry collection Sisters’ Entrance, Emtithal Mahmoud was born in Sudan and came to the US in 1998 as a child refugee. She won the 2015 Individual World Poetry Slam Championship with her poem “Mama.” In an interview with PRI’s The World, she said, “It’s mostly about my mother on the surface, but the reality is that the things I learned from her she learned from her mother, and her mother before her . . . [I]t’s about the women in my family, the women in my life.” Since high school, she has been an activist dedicated to bringing attention to the violence in Darfur. “The interesting thing about war is that people seem to think there’s a particular start and end to the war, but in reality, it’s much messier than that. When Darfur was no longer on the front page of the New York Times every day, when people stopped talking about it in the big media outlets, people thought, ‘Oh, the war must have stopped.’ But the reality is, we’re still living it every day,” she told PRI’s The World. Appointed a Goodwill Ambassador in 2018 for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, she has traveled extensively to witness its work and has represented the organization at many high-profile events, including the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society. (@EmiThePoet)
Mia Ayumi Malhotra is a poet from the San Francisco Bay Area. The child of missionary parents, she moved with her family in 1990 to the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, a country then coming out of Cold War isolation, a place without paved roads or traffic lights. It was there Malhotra began to write. In an essay for Inheritance, she recalled, “I wrote stories about the world around me, and when I didn’t know the word for something, penciled in an empty speech bubble to indicate the presence of something that couldn’t be articulated.” Her debut poetry collection, Isako Isako, winner of the 2017 Alice James Award, follows four generations of female Japanese Americans, including an internment camp survivor, to explore how mass displacement and rampant racism in America’s past relate to current events. A Pushcart nominee, she’s received fellowships from the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop and Kundiman. (miamalhotra.com)
Rajiv Mohabir is a Guyanese American poet and translator of Indo-Caribbean origin. His parents emigrated from Guyana to London to Canada to New York City and then moved to Florida. During a difficult adolescence, Mohabir found solace in writing. He’s the author of the poetry collections The Taxidermist’s Cut, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and The Cowherd’s Son, winner of the Kundiman Prize. He describes his project Coolitude: Poetics of the Indian Labor Diaspora as “the cultural productions of writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers who descend from indentured laborers [‘coolies’] from Guyana, Trinidad, Suriname, Mauritius, South Africa, Fiji, and those in second diaspora in England, the United States, and Canada.” In an essay for Jacket2, he wrote: “I am haunted by transoceanic crossings, the suppression of my familial religions and languages, and being thingified—albeit to a lesser extent than Black folks. This rich and colorful history shows up in my poetry as I write.” Mohabir received his PhD in English from the University of Hawai‘i and is currently an assistant professor of poetry at Auburn University. (rajivmohabir.com)
Born in Haiti and raised in the Boston suburbs, Lenelle Moïse is a poet, playwright, and performance artist who creates jazz-infused, hip-hop bred, politicized texts about the intersection of identity, memory, and spirit. In an interview with Time Out New York, Moïse said this about her performance work: “I’m really interested in breaking down the fourth wall of theater. And one of the ways is just by saying, ‘I can hear you, I can see you. We’re all in this together,’ and trying to create a casual ceremony with the audience.” Her performances include: Where There Are Voices, a response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti based on her poetry collection Haiti Glass; Speaking Intersections, a queer feminist blend of poetry and prose; Word Life, an autobiographical coming-of-age story; and K-I-S-S-I-N-G, about teens bonding across their socioeconomic differences. In an interview with the Smith College alumnae magazine, she said, “I see poetry everywhere: in movement, in dialogue, in Haiti, in paintings, in the public-housing tenements of my memories, in embraces. My credo is that a poem is only effective on stage when my writing is pulsing with life.” (lenellemoise.com)
A daughter of Dominican immigrants, Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet, translator, and educator who was born and raised in New York City. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry and Poetry in Translation and was a 2014 CantoMundo Fellow. Her poetry collection, The Pink Box, was longlisted for a PEN award. In an interview for the Letras Latinas blog, she reflected on her poem “The Day I Realized We Were Black”: “It was one of the most painful poems to write and took me nearly two years to be able to read it aloud without crying. And that is poetry, when the truth in the poem turns you so delicate that you break, then you know you’re risking everything on the page.” (yeseniamontilla.com)
Gala Mukomolova is a Russian American poet, essayist, and artist living in New York City, who, under the name Galactic Rabbit, writes horoscopes and love notes for NYLON. A recipient of the 2016 “Discovery”/Boston Review poetry contest prize, she is the author of the poetry collections One Above/One Below: Positions & Lamentations and Without Protection. In her essay “Golubki, Golubchik,” published in The Crazy Wisdom Community Journal, she wrote: “Between worlds, I had too much language and not enough, and because of this I was a child who rarely spoke from a place of want. To express want was a sign of weakness, and I trained myself around it.” (galacticrabbit.com)
Born to a Filipina mother and a father from South India, Aimee Nezhukumatathil spoke of her childhood in an interview for Divedapper: “Growing up as one of the only Asian-Americans in most of my school always set me a little apart, always observing. But my parents fostered a sense of being grateful and amazed and wanting to always be curious about the world and its inhabitants so I never truly felt alone.” That curiosity led her to write poetry that is often inspired by her love of nature and science. She’s the author of four poetry collections, most recently Oceanic, as well as World of Wonder, a book of illustrated nature essays. The Tupelo Press Prize, the Global Filipino Award, a Pushcart, and a National Endowment are among her distinctions. She teaches creative writing and environmental literature at the University of Mississippi and is the poetry editor of Orion magazine. In her Divedapper interview, she also said, “I’m not sorry for writing about wonder and joy.” (aimeenez.net)
Hieu Minh Nguyen identifies himself as “a queer Vietnamese American poet and performer based out of Minneapolis.” He’s the author of the poetry collections This Way to the Sugar, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and Note Here. He has received a 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the NEA and Kundiman. He is also a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine and an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. In an interview for Poets & Writers, he said, “For a long time, I didn’t know how to write about my traumas. I found myself writing the same poems over and over again, even if they didn’t make any sense to the world . . . I guess the hope was that if I could write the poems, if I could speak about my trauma in a way that didn’t seem careless, I could stop trying to explain myself.” (hieuminhnguyen.com)
The son of Mexican immigrants, José Olivarez is co-host of the podcast The Poetry Gods and the author of the poetry collection Citizen Illegal. He is a marketing manager for Young Chicago Authors (YCA), where he began writing poetry as a teen—an experience that helped prepare him for his admission to Harvard University. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, he talked about overcoming the feelings of “weakness” he felt because of his native language and culture. “As I began writing, I realized I could be a part of a loving community. It didn’t have to be me against the world; it was a community trying to build a new world for everyone we love.” About his poem “ode to the first white girl i ever loved,” Olivarez says, “I wrote [it] in a workshop while thinking about romantic love as a political choice. If I only see white women as beautiful, and I do not come from a white woman, then how do I see myself?” (joseolivarez.com)
Ladan Osman is a Somali-born American poet and educator whose work is centered on her Somali and Muslim heritage. She is the author of the poetry collections Ordinary Heaven, a chapbook which was included in Seven New Generation African Poets, a project of the African Poetry Book Fund, The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony, which won the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, and Exiles of Eden. A teacher by profession, she is also a contributing editor at the Offing. She grew up in a Columbus, Ohio, neighborhood that was largely populated by other East Africans, and she told the Paris Review that while she’s “rooted to America,” her “cellular memory calls to places I haven’t seen in my adult life. Sometimes negotiating that feels like a challenge. In my poems, too—trying to figure out who the work is for, what the work is for, what it is meant to do.” She added: “So many different elements go into my work, but there’s a very direct link to the way my parents would tell stories—their comfort using parables, making leaps in language, speaking in metaphor.” (@OsmanLadan)
Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru (Chamorro) from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). As a poet, scholar, publisher, critic, artist, and environmental activist, he has co-edited three anthologies of Pacific Islander literature, and he has authored four poetry collections and two spoken word albums. In an interview for NBC Asian America Presents: A to Z, Perez said, “I am inspired by the ecology of the Pacific Islanders, the resilience of the Pacific Islanders, the wisdom of Pacific cultures, the brilliance of Pacific scholarship, and the beauty of Pacific arts,” adding, “The forces of colonialism, militarism, and capitalism are challenges that impact all of us in the Pacific.” About his poem “Off-Island Chamorros,” he says it was “written to share my own migration story from Guam, a territory of the United States, and to provide context for the migration of my native Chamorro people.” Perez teaches in the English department at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. (craigsantosperez.com)
Spoken-word artist, poet, essayist, and activist Bao Phi was born in Vietnam and came to Minneapolis as a child with his family. He’s a two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist, who has appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and was featured in the award-winning documentary The Listening Project. His books include the poetry collections Sông I Sing and Thousand Star Hotel, as well as the picture book A Different Pond, which received a Caldecott Honor Award. BuzzFeed named Thousand Star Hotel one of the best poetry books of 2017, writing, “Bao Phi confronts the stereotype of being a ‘model minority’ . . . exploring Asian American poverty, racism and discrimination, police brutality, violence and trauma, identity, and fatherhood. Written with immense empathy and honesty, [it] is a moving, heartbreakingly beautiful portrait of the lives of Vietnamese refugees in the U.S.” (baophi.com)
Poet, educator, and performance artist Yosimar Reyes was born in Mexico and came to California with his grandmother when he was three. In an interview with Westword, he said, “When I think of my culture, it is very American, but I lack the proper documentation to say that I’m an ‘American,’ whatever that means. Because I don’t have a social security number and I lack access to a lot of things, I’ve found that art was something that was very accessible . . . Most of what I write focuses on intersections of migration and sexuality.” He is the author of the poetry collection for colored boys who speak softly and artist-in-residence for Define American, the nonprofit media organization that fights injustice and anti-immigrant hate through the power of storytelling. Reyes is the co-founder of the performance ensemble La Maricolectiva, a community-based performance group of queer undocumented poets, which was featured in the award-winning documentary 2nd Verse: The Rebirth. (yosimarreyes.com)
Alberto Ríos is a Mexican American poet from Nogales, Arizona. “My upbringing [near the Mexico–US border] was wonderful and I would not trade it for anything,” he told an AARP VIVA interviewer. “It showed me how to look at everything in more than one way: different languages, different foods, different laws. The whole world was never simply one-dimensional. And for me as a writer—and later as a poet in particular—that was invaluable.” Arizona’s first poet laureate and an Academy of American Poets chancellor, Ríos is the author of ten books of poetry including, most recently, A Small Story about the Sky, as well as a memoir, Capirotada. (english.clas.asu.edu/content/alberto-rios)
Michelle Brittan Rosado is the author of the poetry collection Why Can’t It Be Tenderness, which won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Her work appears in Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25 and Only Light Can Do That: 100 Post-Election Poems, Stories, & Essays. Born in San Francisco, she’s of mixed cultural heritage, including Malaysian on her mother’s side. About her poem “Fluency,” she says, “I wrote this poem thinking about the way immigration creates many kinds of distance in a family: not just geographical, but sometimes linguistically and emotionally. At the same time, it also strikes me as miraculous and beautiful that we find ways to bridge such spaces, however we can.” Rosado is a Wallis Annenberg Endowed Fellow and PhD candidate in Creative Writing & Literature at the University of Southern California. (michellebrittanrosado.com)
Poet, novelist, and essayist Erika L. Sánchez is the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants and was raised outside of Chicago. She’s received many fellowships and awards, including, most recently, a Princeton Arts Fellowship, and is the author of the poetry collection Lessons of Expulsion and the New York Times bestselling young adult novel I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, which was a National Book Award finalist. “A ruthless reviser” is what she called herself in an interview for RHINO: “Usually, a poem begins as an image that gets stuck in my brain. I see or hear something grotesque or beautiful or both that startles me and then I become obsessed with it until it becomes a poem. Sometimes it takes me years to complete a poem. Sometimes they require me to leave them alone for months and months before I can revise them again . . . Poetry feels like my brain giving birth to something painful and grotesque.” (erikalsanchez.com)
Solmaz Sharif was born in Istanbul as her parents made their way from their native Iran to the US several years after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. She is a poet who writes about the human costs of war and the political use of “insidious abuses against our everyday speech.” Her first poetry collection, LOOK, was a National Book Award finalist. She has described her work as both “political” and “documentary,” saying in an interview with the Paris Review that she has felt like an outsider despite growing up in a largely Iranian American community: “Aesthetics and politics have a really vital and exciting give-and-take between them . . . No matter where I went, I was outside of whatever community I found myself in, so that even when I arrived in a place where there was a lot of ‘me,’ I was totally outside again. That probably influenced my artistic impulse . . . to stand outside of and look into, and constantly question and interrogate the collectives that exist. It’s easy for me because I’ve never felt a part of any of them in a real way.” (solmazsharif.com)
Mahtem Shiferraw is a poet, short story writer, and visual artist from Ethiopia and Eritrea. Her poetry books include Behind Walls & Glass, Fuchsia, which received the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, and Your Body Is War. She’s the founder of Anaphora Literary Arts, a nonprofit organization working to advance the works of writers and artists of color, and co-founder of the Ethiopian Artist Collective. About her approach to writing, Shiferraw told the Massachusetts Review, “I see poems everywhere I go, whatever I’m doing. Sometimes it’s a sound, or a color, or a perplexed expression. Sometimes poems come in the form of a character, or a conversation, and then they are shaped into prose (which eventually becomes part of my fiction writing). My job, besides listening to my characters, becomes then an act of mending of sorts; I patch poems here and there until I begin to acquire some clarity and make sense of a story, a plot line, a theme.” (mahtem-shiferraw.com)
Terisa Siagatonu is a queer Samoan womyn poet, arts educator, and community organizer, who was born in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2012, she received President Obama’s Champion of Change Award for her activism as a spoken-word poet/organizer in her Pacific Islander community. When asked by the Split This Rock blog to recount a “proud poetry moment,” Siagatonu replied, “Last year, I had the opportunity to visit American Samoa and spend an entire week leading writing workshops for 5 of the high schools on the island, including the one my father attended when he was a teenager . . . I’ve never felt so proud to be both Samoan and a writer. It meant everything to me to be able to share something as important as writing with my people, because both are the reasons why I’m still here and why I know who I am.” (terisasiagatonu.com)
Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Her first full-length poetry collection, Cannibal, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and the Phillis Wheatley Award, among many others. In a PEN Ten interview, she said, “It’s hard to remember a time when ‘writer’ was really separate from my sense of identity—I began writing early at 10 or 11 and published my first work at 16 in Jamaica.” Her first realization of what she wanted to write about came in college when she encountered overt racism: “And that was the moment I decided that my responsibility as a poet was to always keep my gaze centered on my Jamaican landscape, to tell the stories of Jamaican womanhood, of blackness and marginalization, to write against postcolonial history and nurture anti-colonial selfhood. To leave no space, no place, not even a sliver of consideration for the venal hegemony of whiteness in my imagination; dark, beautiful, and untamed.” (safiyasinclair.com)
Cambodian American poet Monica Sok is the daughter of refugees and the granddaughter of Em Bun, a master silk weaver and NEA National Heritage Fellow. Her poetry collection Year Zero won the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship, and she has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, Kundiman, and Stanford University, among others. About “Oh, Daughter,” she says, “Writing this poem allowed me to process what ‘belonging’ means as a Cambodian American daughter. Falling short of both cultural and parental expectations, I am always aware of how others perceive shame. But the spirit of the poem is rooted in defying gendered expectations and embraces such agency.” (@monicasokwrites)
Gary Soto was born to working-class parents in Fresno, California. While young, he worked in both the fields and factories. It was in high school that he became inspired to write after reading such authors as Hemingway, Frost, Wilder, and Steinbeck. “I was already thinking like a poet, already filling myself with literature,” he recalled, in an interview with UC San Diego. Soto has published more than forty books for children, young adults, and adults, including most recently a new edition of his 1977 debut poetry collection, The Elements of San Joaquin, a pioneering work in Latino literature. The Gary Soto Literary Museum is located at Fresno City College. Of his job as a writer, he has said, “My duty is not to make people perfect, particularly Mexican Americans. I’m not a cheerleader. I’m one who provides portraits of people in the rush of life.” (garysoto.com)
Filipino American poet Jeff Tagami was born and raised in California. When he was in his twenties, he joined the Kearny Street Workshop, an Asian American artists and writers’ collective, publishing short stories and poems that focused on the struggles of factory and field workers, including Without Names, one of the first Filipino American poetry anthologies. He was featured reading his poem “Song of the Pajaro,” about a day in the life of Pajaro Valley farmers, in the PBS film The United States of Poetry. Tagami died of cancer in 2012, and in an online remembrance, poet Alan Chong Lau said Tagami’s poetry collection October Light “will go down in history as one of the classics of Filipino American literature . . . [It] is one of the first books that documents the history and lives of the rural Filipino and gives them a real voice.”
Alice Tao was born in China in 1935. Due to Japan’s invasion of China, her family was forced to move often over a period of several years. When they finally settled in a small village, Tao enjoyed a happy childhood in a safe environment, free to wander, picking berries by the river. Later, during the Chinese Civil War, her family fled to Hong Kong, her father certain that life as refugees was better than living under communism. Tao went to Taiwan for college, where she met her husband. From there they went to the United States. For many years, she taught Chinese at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Tao’s love for poetry began when, as a small child, she sat beside her mother as she recited Tang Dynasty poems while rocking her baby sister to sleep.
Chrysanthemum Tran is a queer and transgender Vietnamese American poet, performer, and photographer, whose parents came to the US as refugees. A teaching artist for the Providence Poetry Slam youth team, she’s the first transfeminine finalist at the Women of the World Poetry Slam, a Rustbelt Poetry Slam champion, and FEMS Poetry Slam champion, whom the Adobe Project 1324 named as one of their “5 Poets You Need to Follow Right Now.” In an interview for the Blueshift Journal, she discussed how she became a poet: “When I was a little baby, when I was in public school in Oklahoma, the shit that changed my life was Maya Angelou. She was my first introduction to poetry that wasn’t written by a cis white man or wasn’t written in inaccessible language.” (chrysanthemumtran.com)
Paul Tran is a Vietnamese American poet, slam poetry champion, educator, and editor who grew up in a San Diego neighborhood that included Vietnamese, Sudanese, Eritrean, and Mexican immigrants. “It’s powerful,” Tran said in an interview for Northwest Asian Weekly, “seeing refugees, immigrants, and families of color making sense of their new lives in the United States, its tragedies and triumphs, and exacting all their human gifts in the cultivation of futures that are, as many of us hope, brighter and safer than the futures we were once conferred. I saw this each time my mother swallowed the patronizing and racist and sexist ways her customers treated her, each time I took the bus two hours to and from high school . . . [where] wealth and conservatism told me I wasn’t supposed to succeed in life or that I was inadequately built for the privileges others had.” They are a 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow, a poetry editor at the Offing, and a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow in the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. (iampaultran.com)
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is an American poet, essayist, and translator of Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian heritage, who has lived and traveled throughout the Arab world. For many years, she volunteered for Seattle’s Arab American community organizations to help people tell their stories of living between two homelands, and her poetry collections Arab in Newsland and Water & Salt are inspired by such experiences. In an interview for Hedgebrook, she said, “My mother’s family is from Syria and Jordan. My father’s family is from Palestine, and many of them became refugees after the 1967 war. My parents immigrated to the United States and I was born in Seattle. When I was three years old we moved back to the Arab world and I spent most of my childhood there. I grew up moving, moving back, travelling around a world I was introduced to as ‘home.’ In some ways, this is a quintessentially Arab experience. The tension between home and homeland, the transitory nature of belonging, these are themes that continue to interest me.” (lenakhalaftuffaha.com)
Born in Saigon, Ocean Vuong immigrated to the US when he was two as a child refugee and grew up in Connecticut. The author of the multi-award-winning poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds and the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, he is an assistant professor in the MFA for Poets and Writers program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In an interview for Divedapper, he said, “I think my reckoning with the written word was also the reckoning with racism, which is sad, but also necessary and, in a way, a vital means of confronting the realities of my country, of America.” As for the role of identity in his writing, he sees “[it] more as a thread being pushed through a piece of fabric as it’s being woven, and that all of our identities are fibers woven in that thread. To write is to push all of oneself through that moment, through that space on the page. Of course, no matter what I do or say, I will always be an Asian-American, Vietnamese, Queer, etc., including all the identities that I don’t even have the language for yet.” (oceanvuong.com)
Award-winning Iranian-born poet and writer Sholeh Wolpé has authored four poetry collections and two plays, edited three anthologies, and translated four volumes of poetry, including, most recently, The Conference of Birds by Attar, the Sufi mystic poet. Her play SHAME was a 2016 Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwright conference semifinalist. In 2018 she was the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at UCLA. Born in Tehran, she spent her teen years in Trinidad and the UK before coming to the US. About her poem “Dear America,” she says, “I kept going back to my journey towards America which in my young life was not a country but a dream space, somewhere out there, like music or a piece of art.” (sholehwolpe.com)
Jenny Xie, who was born in China and raised in New Jersey, came to the US when she was four years old. Her debut poetry collection, Eye Level, won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and Princeton University’s Holmes National Poetry Prize and was a National Book Award finalist. When asked what advice she has for young writers, she told the blog Speaking of Marvels, “I’ll echo what many poets have said . . . : read avidly and widely. There doesn’t seem to be any substitute to that. You learn to internalize the rhythms of good writing through reading, and you sharpen your inner ear this way.” Xie lives in Brooklyn and teaches at New York University. (jennymxie.com)
Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and at the age of nine immigrated unaccompanied to the US through Guatemala, Mexico, and the Sonoran Desert. His poetry collection Unaccompanied, which won a Firecracker Award, explores the impact of migration and the Salvadoran Civil War on his family. He has been awarded numerous fellowships, including a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. About his poem “Second Attempt Crossing,” Zamora says, “I wouldn’t be here without the generosity, the humanity, of someone like Chino. Please acknowledge the humanity of humans that take a wrong path, especially now when Central Americans continue to be dehumanized by this government.” (javierzamora.net)