Book of the Month
Erené with Wolf Medicine
Author: Irene I. Blea
Publisher: Prickly Pear Publishing
ISBN-10: 0385546661 / ISBN-13: 978-0385546669
SUMMARY:
There are many surprises in this book. In Erené With Wolf Medicine Irene I. Blea skillfully introduces us to her Native American, Chicano, and dominant cultural experiences. She carries us with her when she moves from a mountain to rural farm life, to an industrial city, and produces an intense memoir about growing up in an extended family during an era when women were expected to fit into prescribed ways of being and seeing the world. This is also a story about the complexities of being tri-cultural in a dominant society that does not frequently validate a young girl with wolf medicine. Nevertheless, Blea grew into a woman when People of Color broke out of the old constrictive ways of being. She introduces us to the concept of genízaro and highlights how she used wolf medicine to navigate the intersection of race, class gender, and to define her own life while obtaining academic positions not normally held by those of her tri-cultural background. She did this in employment and as a Chicana poet, scholar, and feminist in the social justice movements of her era. Erené With Wolf Medicine demonstrates how difficult it was and still is for women to advance in the face of patriarchal and colonizer procedures, expectations, ways of thinking, and doing. One must rely on their inner power to overcome immense obstacles to redefine their own life.
About the Author:
Dr. Irene Blea is a native of New Mexico with a Ph. D. in Sociology from the University of Colorado-Boulder. Her area of specialization is the intersection of race, class, and gender discrimination. Blea’s first job was as a Psychiatric Nurse on the ward of a mental hospital but the prize-winning author began her public life reading her feminist poetry during the height of the Chicano Movement. Twenty-three years later, her most requested poem is still Damn, Sam, I What to Share My Life but Need to Live Alone. Dr. Blea was surprised when she was asked to do the poem during a poetry slam. “I was intimidated by the loud energy of the youths but I did it the way I wrote it and it was well received. I was overwhelmed when the audience stood up and clapped using the applause style of the early movement.” Blea has written and published thirteen books and well over thirty popular and academic articles. Seven of her textbooks have been used on university campuses to teach ethnic and womens studies. After her retirement from California State University-Los Angeles she wrote her trilogy: Suzanna, Poor People’s Flowers, Beneath the Super Moon, novels based on family stories. Blea’s novel Daughters of the West Mesa is based upon the discovery of 11 female remains and an unborn fetus buried west of Albuquerque. She works on two or three projects at a time. Her works in progress are two epic poems: Burning, about the forest fires in the southwest and another titled The Desert Speaks. Two of her textbooks, Toward a Chicano Social Science and La Chicana are considered classics in her field. She has published four poetry chapbooks and is currently compiling poetry from those chapbooks in a book and is working with Mark Quzio to read them to music. Her autobiography/memoir, Erené with Wolf Medicine, is her latest release. Dr. Irene Blea is a frequent speaker at conferences and on university campuses. She maintains an online presence via her personal page and another titled Chicana! on Facebook and teaches an online writer’s workshop for unpublished authors.
Facebook: @IreneBlea
Conversations With Book
WHEN TRYING TO RETURN HOME
Author: Jennifer Martiza McCauley
Publisher: Catapult Press
ISBN: 1640095683 / ISBN-13: 978-1640095687
SUMMARY:
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A dazzling debut collection spanning a century of Black American and Afro-Latino life in Puerto Rico, Pittsburgh, Louisiana, Miami, and beyond—and an evocative meditation on belonging, the meaning of home, and how we secure freedom on our own terms
Profoundly moving and powerful, the stories in When Trying to Return Home dig deeply into the question of belonging. A young woman is torn between overwhelming love for her mother and the need to break free from her damaging influence during a desperate and disastrous attempt to rescue her brother from foster care. A man, his wife, and his mistress each confront the borders separating love and hate, obligation and longing, on the eve of a flight to San Juan. A college student grapples with the space between chivalry and machismo in a tense encounter involving a nun. And in 1930s Louisiana, a woman attempting to find a place to call her own chances upon an old friend at a bar and must reckon with her troubled past.
Forming a web of desires and consequences that span generations, McCauley’s Black American and Afro–Puerto Rican characters remind us that these voices have always been here, occupying the very center of American life—even if we haven’t always been willing to listen.
About the Author:
Jennifer Maritza McCauley is a writer, poet, and university professor. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio, CantoMundo and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. She holds an MFA from Florida International University and a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Missouri. The author of the cross-genre collection SCAR ON/SCAR OFF, she is an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Houston-Clear Lake.
Website: https://www.jennifermaritzamccauley.com/
Facebook: @jennifermaritzamccauley
Twitter: @martizareader47
