“Heritage & History”: Anuradha Bhowmik, Jasminne Mendez & Alexandra Lytton Regalado

Alexandra Lytton Regalado is the author of the poetry collection Matria, which won the St. Lawrence Book Award. She is co-director of Editorial Kalina and editor of Puntos de Fuga/Vanishing Points (Editorial Kalina, 2017), a bilingual anthology of contemporary Salvadoran prose. She lives in Miami and San Salvador, El Salvador. When COVID-19 broke out and the United States closed the border to travel, Lytton Regalado was separated from her family in El Salvador. Written entirely during the lockdown, the poems in Relinquenda (Beacon Press) are a meditation on illness, the passing of her father, and the renewed significance of community. The central part of the collection focuses on her father during his six-year struggle with cancer and explores how it might serve as a mirror and warning. Other poems address what it means for daughters, mothers, and wives to care for one another as reflected in her relationships with the men in her life. Situated in the tropical landscapes of Miami and El Salvador, the poems also negotiate the meaning of home, reflecting on immigration and the ties between the U.S. and El Salvador 30 years after her birth country’s decadelong civil war.

Anuradha Bhowmik is a Bangladeshi American poet and writer. She is a 2022 Kundiman fellow and a 2018 AWP Intro Journals Project winner in poetry. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Poetry, the Sun, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. Life as a Bangladeshi-born American girl growing up as a first-generation immigrant in the United States shapes her debut collection. Brown Girl Chromatography (University of Pittsburgh Press) explores issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality in post-9/11 America while navigating the poet’s millennial childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. She faces cruelties in the American and Bangladeshi worlds without any guidance or instruction on how to survive. Any visible traces of her Bangladeshi life result in racial ridicule from her peers, while participating and assimilating into American culture is met with violence and abuse at home. As language and memory intersect, Bhowmik draws on pop culture and free association to examine her displacement from many angles and make meaning out of hurt.

Jasminne Mendez is a Dominican American poet, translator, playwright and award-winning author of several books for children and adults. Her debut poetry collection, City Without Altar (Noemi Press), was a finalist for the Noemi Press poetry prize and was released in August 2022, and her debut middle grade novel in verse, Aniana del Mar Jumps In (Dial), is forthcoming in 2023. Her poetry and essays have been published or are forthcoming in The New England Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, and others. She is the author of Island of Dreams, Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e: Personal Essays and Poetry, A Bucket of Dirty Water: Memories of My Girlhood, and the picture book Josefina’s Habichuelas. City Without Altar (Noemi Press) is a poetry collection and play in verse that explores what it means to live, love, heal and experience violence as a Black person in the world. “Machete,” the play in verse at the center of the book, amplifies the voices and experiences of victims, survivors, and living ancestors of the 1937 Haitian Massacre along the northwest Dominican-Haitian border during the Trujillo Era. Between the scenes are interludes that explore a different kind of cutting and what it means to feel “othered” because of illness, disability, and blackness. Ultimately, City Without Altar is a meditation on being/feeling blacked out by the archive, on the world stage, and in one’s daily life.