Loaded Terms: Poets on Identity & Truth

Caridad Moro-Gronlier is a Cuban American lesbian poet born in Los Angeles to Cuban immigrant parents. She is the author of the chapbook Visionware, a contributing editor of Grabbed: Poets & Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing, and associate editor for SWWIM Every Day, an online daily poetry journal. Tortillera: Poems (Texas Review Press) is her debut collection. The word “tortillera” means lesbian in Español. The moniker is familiar to most Spanish-speaking cultures, but is especially particular to the Cuban experience. In most Cuban American households, to be called a tortillera is a catcall that whips through the air like a lash whose only intention is to wound, to scar. Here, Moro-Gronlier not only applies the term to herself, she owns it, drapes it over her shoulders and heralds her truth through candid, unflinching poems that address the queer experience of coming out while Cuban. The first half of the book immediately plunges the reader into the speaker’s Cuban American life on-the-hyphen through vivid, first-person narratives. The work contained within the collection befits its audacious title – bold, original and utterly without shame. Jenny Molberg, author of Refusal: Poems, celebrated it. “An unflinching, delicious, and fierce anthem to Cuban American and queer identities, Tortillera reclaims the homophobic slur of its title, engaging and subverting the canonical tradition of the love poem.”

Nikki Moustaki has published 46 books, including The Bird Market of Paris: A Memoir. Her poetry and essays have appeared in various anthologies and college textbooks, including Poetry After 9-11: An Anthology of New York Poets and America Now. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, the Miami Herald, Latina, The Village Voice, Publishers Weekly, and others. She currently writes a column for Dogster Magazine. In Extremely Lightweight Guns: Poems (Red Hen Press), Moustaki explores femininity in contexts that grapple with violence, mental illness, loss, love, and relationships. She probes these themes through various provocative narratives, settings, and forms, from a prose poem to diary-like entries. She writes about a gun shop owner ranting about the Second Amendment, the disintegration of an abusive relationship, and three generations of superstitious women living without men in a strange world of their own creation. Poet Campbell McGrath called it “a riot of colorful birds, electric passions, and lyric panache. There is an incendiary delight to these poems, which threaten to burst into linguistic and narrative flame on nearly every page. … Nikki Moustaki … is a voice to be reckoned with.”

Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in the United States, Richard Blanco is the author of the poetry collections City of a Hundred Fires, Directions to the Beach of the Dead, and Looking for The Gulf Motel, and the memoir For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey, recounting his experience in being selected by President Barack Obama in 2012 to serve as the nation’s fifth presidential inaugural poet. He is also a contributor to Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness (University of Florida Press). The collection showcases what editor Anjanette Delgado calls “literatura del desarraigo,” a Spanish literary tradition. Home in Florida features fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by Blanco, Ana Menéndez, Caridad Moro-Gronlier, Achy Obejas, Isvett Verde and many others. These writers – first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants to Florida from places such as Cuba, Mexico, Honduras, Perú, Argentina, and Chile – reflect the diversity of Latinx experiences across the state. Together, they explore what exactly makes Florida home for those struggling between memory and presence.