Ink Knows No Borders

by Patrice Vecchione

  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 th
ey 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 t
hat 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)