Who cut the path that we follow and when must we cut our own? Who was it who preserved the sweetness of the waters that we drink and what do we do with the poison we inherit? How do we discover our stories and bring them into an embodied and present truth? In this panel, the poets, Raina J. León, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Roberto Carlos García, and Malcolm Friend reflect on their literary and familial ancestors, how the past infuses their work, and what they are doing in this moment to extend and create new legacies worthy of remembrance and stewardship through writing in response to the archive of memory and document. The poets assembled are founders of publications, podcasts, and institutes, innovators across artistic media, mentors and educators, contributors to the literary field in ways that have not existed before them. The future of Afro-Latinx creatives will be exponentially different and more powerfully known and that comes from a distinct consciousness of one’s place within a larger story, one that knows that our ancestors survived for our thriving, their seeded and ceded a way for our furious flowering.
Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). 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 has received fellowships with the Obsidian Foundation, Macdowell, Anaphora, VONA, Cave Canem, Macondo, CantoMundo among others. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts.
Darrel Alejandro Holnes is the author of Stepmotherland (Notre Dame Press, 2022) & Migrant Psalms (Northwestern Press, 2021). Holnes is an Afro-Panamanian American writer, performer, and educator. His writing has been published in English, Spanish, and French in literary journals, anthologies, and other books worldwide and online. He also writes for the stage. Most of his writing centers on love, family, race, immigration, and joy. He works as a college professor in New York City, NY.
Roberto Carlos Garcia was born in Harlem, New York, and he writes about the Afro-Latinx and Afro-Diasporic experience. His work has been published widely in places like Poetry Magazine, NACLA, Poets & Writers, The Root, and others. Roberto is a 2023 New Jersey State Council of the Arts Poetry Fellow.
He is the author of five books. Four poetry collections: Melancolía (Cervena Barva Press, 2016), black / Maybe: An Afro Lyric (Willow Books, 2018), [Elegies] (FlowerSong Press, 2020), What Can I Tell You: Selected Poems (Flowersong Press, 2022), and one essay collection, Traveling Freely, forthcoming in 2024 from Curbstone Books / Northwestern University Press.
Roberto is the founder of Get Fresh Books Publishing, a literary nonprofit.
Malcolm Friend is a poet originally from the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. He received his BA from Vanderbilt University and his MFA from University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of the chapbook mxd kd mixtape (Glass Poetry, 2017) and the full-length collection Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple (Inlandia Books, 2018), winner of the 2017 Hillary Gravendyk Prize, and co-edited the anthology Até Mais: Latinx Futurisms (Deep Vellum, 2024). Together with JR Mahung he is a member of Black Plantains, an Afrocaribbean poetry collective. He currently lives and teaches in Austin, TX.