“Meditations on Motherhood”: Allison Blevins & Raina J. León

Allison Blevins is a queer disabled writer. She is the author of the previous collection Handbook for the Newly Disabled, A Lyric Memoir, and the chapbooks Chorus for the Kill, Susurration, Letters to Joan, and A Season for Speaking, part of the Robin Becker series. She is also the founder and director of Small Harbor Publishing and the executive editor at the museum of americana, a literary review. In Slowly/Suddenly (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press) she writes, “If I can give myself anything, let it be a way into anger,” a reasonable creed for navigating a life demanding passivity toward the violence and loss it inflicts. Explored here are the plights of mothers, daughters, lovers, and spouses in a voice that endures scars and calluses but refuses to accept them as necessary. Infertility and motherhood, memory and loss, and love and infidelity are also examined, and she conjures poems from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society website, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and episodes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

Caridad Moro-Gronlier is the author of Tortillera (TRP 2021) – winner of The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: Florida and recipient of a 2022 Eric Hoffer Book Award Honorable Mention, 2022 Eric Hoffer Award Grand Prize Short List honor, 2022 First Horizon Award Finalist honor, and 2022 International Latino Book Award Honorable Mention – and Visionware (Finishing Line Press 2009). She is also a contributing editor for Grabbed: Poets and Writers Respond to Sexual Assault (Beacon Press, 2020) and an associate editor for SWWIM Every Day, the blog of Supporting Women Writers in Miami. She resides in Miami with her family.

Raina J. León, Ph.D., is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo, Anaphora, and the Obsidian Foundation, and the author of black god mother this body, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, sombra: (dis)locate, and the chapbooks profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She publishes across forms in visual art, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and scholarly work. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. Her latest work, black god mother this body (Black Freighter Press), is a collection that includes prose poems, collages, and memories about motherhood, particularly Black motherhood, in all its complexity.