Natalia Trevino’s book: The Road Back

Two years for two thousand dollars. That’s the agreement Berta made with the wealthy Thompson family in San Antonio. That amount of money would change everything for herself and her toddler Josefina, whom she left under the care of Amá and Apá in rural Lagos de Aves, south of the border. But life as a domestic worker is not easy; la Señora is demanding, mercurial and manipulative, and without legal documentation, there’s nothing Berta can do about her employer’s decision to withhold payments until her commitment is fulfilled. Her existence in the Thompson household grows more precarious through a budding relationship with la Señora’s rebellious teenage son. When she discovers their connection and threatens to send Berta away with nothing, Berta packs her bags– taking not the money she has earned but a trampled and steady dream. Together, the young couple heads to California where they both find work, Aaron in a small tire shop and Berta in the fields of the Coachella Valley. Berta’s journey through the present is haunted by memories from her past: a “wedding that was not a wedding, only sadness” to Josefina’s father; asking her parents to care for her child while she is gone; and walking alone in the desert, injured and abandoned by the man who was paid to take her across the border. Laying bare the disorienting blend of hope and exploitation many immigrant women experience, Natalia Treviño’s novel, complemented by striking cover art from Celeste De Luna, is both a modern migration odyssey and a meditation on the cost of dreaming across borders.

Natalia Treveñio has won several awards for her poetry and fiction, including the 2004 Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the 2008 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the 2012 Literary Award from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio. Her work has been anthologized extensively in books such as Inheritance of Light: Contemporary Poetry (University of North Texas Press, 1996) and Mirrors Beneath the Earth (Curbstone Press, 1995), and such journals as Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Houston Literary Review, Sugar House Review and The Platte Valley Review.
Lisha Garcia’s book: A Rope of Luna

Bold, fresh, painful, and charged with spiritual energy, Garcia’s A Rope of Luna pulls us through the cycles of life with insight, passion, and “the stubbornness of a heel ground into the dirt.” Poignant and sweet in its intimacy, this collection of poems immerses us in the raw wound of life as an immigrant child, as a daughter of a dying mother, as an estranged child of a faraway father, of a determined poet capturing the beauty of life in its “new botanical garden where I choose the order of petal and plant.” Vividly painting the experience of leaving her native land and of being immersed in a place where her ethnicity, her language, and the prejudice of local institutions mark her as the despised and the disposable, Garcia evokes an eloquence both powerful and incisive, describing her laws of survival as “You bury screams in the dirt, and can’t move….An unseen raptor….bites off the appendages of all you once knew to be true.” A must-read volume!

Lisha Adela García is a child of the immigrant streams that form the Americas. She is a border mongrel with Spanglish, Mexico and the United States in her psyche and in her work. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and currently resides in Texas with her beloved four-legged children. Lisha also has a Master’s degree for the left side of her brain from the Thunderbird School of Global Management. Her first book, Blood Rivers, was published in 2009 with Blue Light Press of San Francisco. Her chapbook, This Stone will Speak, was published by Pudding House Press in 2008. She has numerous publications in journals including Crab Orchard Review, Mom Egg Review, Boston Review, Border Senses and many others. Lisha is also a literary translator, editor and teacher.

Cyra Sweet Dumitru’s book: Words Make a Way through Fire

Words Make a Way through Fire is an intimate, courageous memoir of a woman shattered by witnessing her eldest brother’s horrific suicide when she was a teenager. The book traces her creative journey of recovery and healing with poetry as a constant companion.

The primary means of Cyra Dumitru’s healing process, from age sixteen through adulthood, is writing poetry and journaling. During this decades-long journey, Cyra experiences a transcendent, loving presence called Voice who guides her and helps her imagine wholeness. She finds community with others through the sharing of poems. She studies poetry as craft and as medicine–becoming a published poet with multiple books, an award-winning college instructor of poetry writing, and a certified practitioner of poetic medicine who creates spaces where others can heal through poetry.

In Words Make a Way through Fire, Cyra explores the specific medicinal properties of poetry–giving order to interior anxiety, trusting the wisdom within–and invites her brother David to speak through her as he reflects upon his final hours. In doing so, poem by poem, she shifts gradually from being traumatized and feeling haunted to feeling empowered and spiritually expansive.

Cyra Sweet Dumitru is a published poet and instructor of poetry, and one of four certified practitioners of poetic medicine in Texas. Her poems have appeared on the walls of City Hall, been spoken on national public radio and in museums, and appeared in city newspapers and national literary journals. Her collections of poems include What the Body Knows, Listening to Light, Remains, and Elder Moon. She offers therapeutic writing circles for adults learning to live with trauma, bereavement, depression, anxiety, and religious trauma. Cyra lives in San Antonio, Texas with her family.