Author Description

Poetry. Latinx Studies. Native American Studies. Middle Eastern Studies. Winner of the 2016 International Latino Book Award for Best Anthology. Required Reading for the 2017 Latino Book Review. Includes 25 full-color illustrations. This collection combines the themes of Immigration Justice in the U.S. and Justice for Palestine. Here in THE BORDER CROSSED US (AN ANTHOLOGY TO END APARTHEID), poets weigh in with images, metaphors and poetic turns that teach and illustrate the dilemmas and injustices currently under-girding the immigration issue. In this collection, we see poems of lament and affirmation, like Dorothy Payne's: 'So with hot woman-words / and a wildfire of revenge, / I'll unbury the mothers / and cradle brown men / still hanging from limbs / to restore to the soil / a borderless nation /...'. Or Antonieta Villamil's: 'Say that I bring in my sight / the eye of the hurricane / and under my fingernails / the earth I could not dig for my dead.' We have odes to the Gaza Strip, to Honduras, South Texas, Colombia, South Africa, the Arab Spring, Los Angeles, Indian lands, and so much more. We have poems in Arab and Hebrew. English, Spanish and anguish. From across this country and other nations, from 'endless' borders to poems without end.--Luis J. Rodriguez, Los Angeles Poet Laureate