Imaniman
Poets Writing in the Anzalduan Borderlands
In homage to Gloria Anzaldúa and her iconic work Borderlands/La Frontera, award-winning poets ire’ne lara silva and Dan Vera have assembled the work of 54 writers who reflect on the complex terrain—the deeply felt psychic, social, and geopolitical borderlands—that Anzaldúa inhabited, theorized, explored, and invented.
Named for the Nahuatl word meaning “their soul,” Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands presents work that is sparked from the soul: the individual soul, the communal soul. These poets interrogate, complicate, and personalize the borderlands in transgressive and transformative ways, opening new paths and revisioning old ones for the next generation of spiritual, political, and cultural border crossers.
“Within shifting borders–it is good to enter into these voice worlds–to stand, bow & listen in their presence. Peoples, familias, cities, towns, rancherías and the wilderness of all border-crossers & messengers of border spaces open in these pages.” –From the Introduction by Juan Felipe Herrera, US Poet Laureate
Contributors include: Juan Felipe Herrera, Rodney Gomez, Daniel E. Solís y Martínez, Carmen Calatayud, ire'ne lara silva, Tara Betts, José Antonio Rodríguez, David Hatfield Sparks, Barbara Jane Reyes, Miguel M. Morales, Cecca Austin Ochoa, Cordelia Barrera, Oswaldo Vargas, Emmy Pérez, Dan Vera, Michael Wasson, Melanie Márquez Adams, Tomas Moniz, Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez, D.M. Chávez, Inés Hernández-Avila, Nidia Melissa Bautista, Nadine Saliba, Monica Palacios, Jennine DOC Wright, César L. De León, Nia Witherspoon, Joe Jiménez, Roy G. Guzmán, Veronica Sandoval, Juan Morales, Victor Payan, Abigail Carl-Klassen, Sarah A. Chavez, Rachel McKibbens, jo reyes-boitel, Adela Najarro, Elsie Rivas Gómez, Lupe Mendez, T. Sarmina, Shauna Osborn, Marie Varghese, Allen Baros, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Ysabel Y. González, Minal Hajratwala, Karla Cordero, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, Pablo Miguel Martínez, Barbara Brinson Curiel, Olga García Echeverría, Suzy de Jesus Huerta, David Bowles, John Fry, Kim Shuck
ire’ne lara silva, the 2023 Texas State Poet Laureate, is the author of four poetry collections, furia, Blood Sugar Canto, CUICACALLI/House of Song, and FirstPoems, two chapbooks, Enduring Azucares and Hibiscus Tacos, and a short story collection, flesh to bone, which won the Premio Aztlán.ire’ne is the recipient of a 2021 Tasajillo Writers Grant, a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, and was the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award. ire’ne was awarded the 2021 Texas Institute of Letters Shrake Award for Best Short Nonfiction. ire’ne is currently a Writer at Large for Texas Highways Magazine and is working on a second collection of short stories titled, the light of your body. A new poetry collection, the eaters of flowers, is forthcoming from Saddle Road Press in January 2024. Most recently, she is publishing her first comic book, VENDAVAL (Chispa Imprint of Scout Comics, July 2024).
