Linda Rodriguez's Blog, page 9

Erika Wurth—Books of Interest by Writers of Color

This is the first in my restarted blog series in honor of #diverselit and #WeNeedDiverseBooks. For a number of years, I did a regular series of post, Books of Interest by Writers of Color. Last year, just as I was about to do a month’s intensive of that series in honor of the then-new #diverselit movement online, I went into a series of medical emergencies. Now, I’m back with all the authors and books I’d wanted to feature.
I first encountered Erika Wurth’s work in her book of poetry, Indian Trains (West End Press, ISBN 978-0-9753486-7-3), which I found a remarkably moving first book. Poems like “Time to Dance,” “Genocide Fists,” “Mama Don’t Let Your Quarterbreeds Grow Up to be Cowboys,” “You Didn’t Want a Dollar, You Wanted Me,” “Grandma Was a Beat Poet,” “How to Finance an Illusion,” and “Colfax Reservation Television” offer the reader a glimpse into lives full of wreckage, ironic humor, harsh truths, but also holding tenderness and hope. Using sharp imagery, sometimes biting and sometimes lyrical language, and nuggets of story at the heart of her people and herself, she creates a brave, intimate book about the urban mixed-bloods who make up 70 percent of the Indian population.
In “Time to Dance,” she sums up her hopes for her people with “I want our lives to be a fancydance, for every Indian to run straight into the imagination without stopping for a drink first.” In “Mama Don’t Let Your Quarterbreeds Grow Up to be Cowboys,” her lines are like a prophecy for her next great book, her novel Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend: “They move, their muscles pulling tight, their arms wearing secrets Crazyhorse tattoos under their shirts, filled with spirit, filled with the knowledge of death, running always with the horses”


Wurth’s novel, Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend (Curbside Splendor Publishing, 978-1940430430), came out in September 2014. It’s an intense, gritty story of a sixteen-year-old mixed-blood Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee/white girl living in poverty and hopelessness in a violent home on the outskirts of Denver who is determined to get out of that situation. Unfortunately, the ways she chooses—drug dealing and a sexual relationship with a “cool” loser—aren’t going to work to free her from her misery, especially after she becomes pregnant.
Wurth pulls the reader into Margaritte’s life and her surroundings with sharp, haunting images, tough, realistic dialogue, and emotionally troubling situations and conflicts. As Margritte struggles to survive and find a way to escape her fate and actually thrive, the reader despairs and hopes for her. This gripping narrative is raw and realistic, but Wurth always shows compassion for her underdog protagonist and the people surrounding her in the trap of poverty and dysfunction. Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend is serious medicine using visceral language, but for the strong of heart, it is an empathetic, passionate journey.
Wurth is one of the most promising among a bright crop of newer Native writers. Look for much more from her in both poetry and fiction.



Bio Erika T. Wurth is Apache / Chickasaw / Cherokee and was raised on the outskirts of Denver. She teaches creative writing at Western Illinois University and was a writer-in-residence at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including Boulevard, Fiction, Pembroke, Florida Review, Stand, Cimarron Review, The Cape Rock, Southern California Review and Drunken Boat.
As usual, I recommend that you buy books from the small presses or university presses that produce them as a way of supporting those necessary midwives of literature. The majority of #diverselit is brought out by these presses, and without them, the only diversity we would have in our literature would be the occasional Sherman Alexie or Louise Erdrich. Much as I love both of those writers, I also know they would be the first to tell you there are many more fine Indigenous writers out there who are published by less well-known presses.
For Indian Trains, visit West End Press at: http://www.westendpress.org/catalog/books/indian_trains.shtml
For Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend, visit Curbside Splendor Publications at: http://www.curbsidesplendor.com/books/crazy-horses-girlfriend
The next installment in this series will be Marjorie Agosín’s marvelous new YA novel based on her own teen years having to flee the Pinochet regime in Chile.

One More Reason Why We Need #DiverseLit

Since I’m coming back from a year of serious illness and starting a new round of my longstanding series, Books of Interest by Writers of Color, I thought I’d reprise the blog post that I used to begin this new round just before I ended up in multiple surgeries and treatments. That post was never really followed up on because of the surprise of cancer, so I’ll post it again and list some of the authors I’ll be featuring in upcoming weeks.
In future weeks, I’ll be looking at the recent work of Marjorie Agosín, Kim Shuck, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Linda Hogan, Frances Washburn, Gerald Vizenor, Richard Vargas, Allison Hedge Coke, Juliana Aragon Fatula, Erika Wurth, and many more fine writers. I hope you’ll come back to read about the exciting work they are doing. I started this Books of Interest by Writers of Color series as a resource for teachers and librarians who had asked me for help as I made appearances around the country. And the blog post below helps to explain why I think this is more important than ever.
---------------- The other day I had a conversation with a very wealthy and well-educated white man. This conversation still bothers me. Probably because it’s a discussion whose main points I’ve had to deal with many times before with other people. Note: this guy was not some ignorant, insensitive racist spouting ethnic slurs.
Still, he didn’t understand what I was talking about because ultimately he was not yet able to stand outside his privilege of white skin, male gender, and inherited wealth. I say, “not yet,” because I refuse to give up hope for him and others I’ve encountered like him, who have genuinely good intentions but can’t get past the blinders of privilege. Earlier conversations with such people have focused around the difficult lives of women living in poverty, the automatic racism encountered over and over by people of color that can leave them justifiably hypersensitive, and similar topics. This conversation centered on books.
This person condemned a wide variety of fiction and poetry by writers of color, in particular Latinas and Latinos, as “just political.” Good writing, according to him, is not “political posturing.” I looked at the list of books we were discussing, which ranged from Rudolfo Anaya and Manuel Muñoz to Luis Alberto Urrea, Sherman Alexie, and Helena Maria Viramontes and were among a group of books and authors branded as extreme political agitation by a rightwing school board (which led to our discussion), and I realized from things he said that he’d not read most of them himself and was just parroting the judgments politicians had laid on them (probably without reading them, either). I tried to explain that most of these writers weren’t trying to write political novels or poetry as much as they were simply trying to be true to the lived experience of their lives and the lives of their families and communities. He didn’t buy it.
You see, in his experience, everyone is deferential and respectful to him. He has no experience of being deliberately humiliated or seeing his parents deliberately humiliated because of the color of their skin, their accent, their Hispanic last names, and/or their poverty. He has no experience of deliberate, offhanded cruelty directed at him or his family or neighbors for no reason other than because the inflictor can get away with it. He has no experience with living in grinding poverty, seeing his parents (and possibly himself) forced into dangerous, unsafe, and unfair working conditions for the tiniest possible wages.
In his world, such things are unreal. Therefore, they must be made up or vastly exaggerated for political purposes. To him, therefore, any writer who simply writes of her childhood misery working in the fields as a migrant laborer as Helena Maria Viramontes does or of the poverty and casual, racist cruelty encountered as the child of an immigrant as Luis J. Rodriguez or the residual trauma of genocide and racism as Sherman Alexie does must be dishonestly fabricating in order to inflame the reader’s emotions for political purposes. Writers speak the truth about their lives and the lives of many in their communities, and because the reality they describe is so unacceptable to privileged white Americans, they are told they must be making it all up for radical political purposes.
I know, unfortunately, that this is a common stance, even among some well-meaning people. So perhaps it’s not surprising that the person whose conversation with me began this post believes that poor people of color writing about their lives and history must be inventing out of whole cloth for inflammatory political purposes. I’m not angry with him. I’m sad for him—and others like him. The only way to get past the blinders of privilege is to take a journey way out of their comfort zones, to walk into the world of the disenfranchised (of whom they are afraid). Or they could read the works of the many gifted Latina/o writers, African American writers, Indigenous writers, Asian American writers, and LGBTQ writers and discover the world these writers and their people live in deep underneath that bright surface of the world of American privilege.
#WeNeedDiverseBooks  #diverselit

Best of Times, Worst of Times, so What’s New?

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…” Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
This blog was severely neglected through much of 2014. The year was a medical nightmare for me, beginning with a tough-to-vanquish pneumonia and, as I recovered, segueing into a life-threatening struggle with breast cancer. I’m thankful to face 2015 as a survivor and really don’t intend to revisit here all the grim, tedious details of the medical aspects of the year.
For the country and the world, this year was troublesome, as well. Iraq and Syria imploding with ISIS violence and atrocities. Russia invading the Ukraine with the most laughable attempts at stealth. Three African countries ravaged by ebola, the 21st-century version of the Black Death. A jumbo jet disappearing off the face of the earth. The gap between the ultra-wealthy elite and the rest of the United States widening drastically. The corporations buying a full U.S. Congress to go with their Supreme Court. An Iditarod that almost couldn’t be run because of the melting of permafrost and tundra. More Native and First Nations women than ever disappearing and found murdered with little or no media attention to it. Finally, lots of media attention to the nightmare of police violence toward people of color, in particular, young black males. And more of the same news of violence, misogyny, racism, environmental destruction, and perpetual war. It becomes too depressing to list it all, and that depression and cynical despair can stifle real work for change. If we let it.

But there were brightnesses in this year, as well, and movements in the right direction and beginnings of change. Thousands of people showed up all over the country for demonstrations against that racist police brutality, and many of them were not African American. People of all backgrounds and skin colors joined together to send a powerful message that we in the United States want full human rights for all of our citizens and oppose the militarization of the police. Gay marriage was approved, or laws against it struck down, all across the country. Violent crime in the United States continued its years-long plummet, in spite of the media hype that makes it seem more violent here than ever. Grass roots movements began to make some real impact, such as the Occupy group in Wisconsin that built a community of tiny houses for the homeless. The struggle against the Keystone pipeline won an important, if temporary, victory.
Also, I have become engrossed in a new—for me—kind of novel project. I am excited by its possibilities and eager to work each day. If you’d like to see the journal entry that was the seed for it, check out this post on The Stiletto Gang blog.
http://thestilettogang.blogspot.com/2015/01/seeds.html
As I face this new year as a cancer survivor, I look forward to this new project, to more Skeet Bannion novels, to a new book of poetry, to a collection of short stories, to teaching a varied schedule of workshops in person and online, and to resuming my favorite series of blog posts, Books of Interest by Writers of Color. I had planned an intensive series of such posts to highlight #WeNeedDiverseBooks and #diverselit. Then, the cancer battle sidelined me. Now, I’m back, so let the spotlighting of diverse books and authors begin.
It’s a new year. Let’s seize it and take it for our own.

Existing While Brown or Black in America

In light of what happened yesterday in Ferguson, Missouri, and the numerous comments I saw about how the police would never harass or harm anyone who wasn't doing something wrong, etc., etc., I'm reposting a blog I wrote for Writers Who Kill immediately after Michael Brown was killed.



In all the turmoil around #Ferguson, Missouri, right now, I notice the inevitable outcries from parts of the white community that the police wouldn’t shoot and kill Michael Brown for nothing, that he must have brought it on himself in some way by his own lawless behavior. Perhaps. We haven’t had a real investigation yet, and only when a stringent, trustworthy investigation has been made will we know all the facts of the situation. From the facts we do know, however, it looks unlikely that Brown did anything so major that it would have warranted taking his life. But to many white, middle-class people who are never hassled and threatened by police as they move through daily life, it seems that surely Brown and all these other unarmed African American, Latino, and Native men killed by police every year must have brought it on themselves through some fault of their own.
So allow me to tell a little story from my own life. In Kansas City, Missouri, where I live, the police used to be as undisciplined and out of control as the Ferguson and St. Louis police. A crisis finally forced the city to crack down, bring in a strong police chief to rebuild the force, and reorganize the police force around the motto of “Protect and Serve.” It’s not a perfect police force now, of course, but it’s plagued by less racial profiling and unnecessary civilian deaths than most urban forces today.
Back when Kansas City’s force was like the Ferguson and St. Louis departments we’re seeing on the news right now, pointing loaded rifles and screaming obscenities and death threats at unarmed demonstrators and reporters, I lived with my late first husband, Michael Rodriguez. Mike was a decorated veteran of Vietnam, married to me with two little kids, working a white-collar, full-time job as manager of a printing supply company branch, going to college at night, and the most non-violent and non-criminal person anyone could imagine. A fire station stood on the corner of the block where his company offices were, and several of the firefighters who were also Vietnam veterans had made friends with him since this was when no one in this country wanted to hear what these guys had gone through. This fact later saved his life.
 One evening in winter when twilight came early, Mike was the last one out of his office, as usual, since he locked up at night and opened up in the mornings. He found his car’s battery had died and called a cab to come take him home. While he stood outside his own offices, dressed in a business suit, waiting for his cab to arrive, two policemen pulled up, got out of their police cruiser, and started harassing him. They shoved him back and forth between them, called him racial slurs, searched him, and found nothing but his wallet, keys, and a tube of prescription ointment for psoriasis in his pockets. One then told the other, “We could shoot this motherfucker and say we thought that was a gun.” Kansas City police had just shot a fourteen-year-old African American boy three days before, claiming they thought the comb in his pocket was a gun—and they got away with it.

Mike thought he would die on that spot, leaving me a young widow with a baby and a toddler and no way for his kids or anyone to know that he had never done anything to deserve it. His firefighter friends had seen what was happening, however, and came out calling his name and asking what was going on and if he needed help. The cops told them to go away, but the firefighter veterans stood there watching until Mike’s cab came, and he got safely away.
If you talk with people of color, you will hear story after story like this. A friend of mine who is a well-known white mystery writer married to an African American (extremely successful) artist just went out and bought all new dress business suits for her husband who, like most artists, normally wears jeans and T-shirts to work in, in the hopes that this will keep the New York City police from stopping and harassing him as he must travel through her city from home to his workplace and back. He must dress up for the commute, only to change into jeans and T-shirt at work, and then reverse the process to go home. White people don’t face this kind of treatment by law enforcement in their own lives, and it sounds so crazy and unreal to them that they assume people of color are exaggerating or making it up out of whole cloth, understandably, but this kind of harassment, threat, and fear is a part of daily life in communities of color all over this country.

Racism is a fixture of American life, but if allowed to flourish openly and unchecked, it won’t stop with communities of color. With the rising militarization of the police forces of large cities and small towns, I would caution my white friends to learn from our experiences. If this kind of behavior is allowed to continue and grow, it will eventually overflow into the white communities, beginning with poor and working-class communities and eventually moving up the socioeconomic ladder. It’s a matter of power and control, even beyond the matter of race and ethnicity.
Whether we know it or not, all of us in the United States have a vested interest in the Ferguson situation. Americans need to have a thorough, unbiased investigation of the Brown killing first, but then we need a reorganization of the Ferguson and St. Louis police forces and other similar departments, such as New York City, like the one Kansas City went through, and we also need a national discussion of the growing militarization of our police departments, large and small, and what we as citizens want to do about this growing threat.

Why I Can’t “Get a Sense of Humor” about Racist Jokes

From my post on The Stiletto Gang today. http://thestilettogang.blogspot.com/



Wednesday night, the National Book Awards took place, and a multiple-New-York-Times bestseller and hugely successful white male author of children’s books, Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), was the host. During the course of the night, he made several racist jokes, including bemoaning the fact that he hadn’t won a Coretta Scott King Award (for African American children’s book writers or children’s literature showcasing African American life--both categories together make up less than 3% of the field), calling two African American nominees for the award in poetry “probable cause,” and topping off his whole night of micro-aggressions with a major watermelon joke directed at African American writer, Jacqueline Woodson, winner of the award in children’s literature.
Here’s the entire event on C-Span. You’ll find the watermelon joke just after the 40-minute mark. http://www.c-span.org/video/?322459-1/2014-national-book-awards
The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, and a number of other mainstream news outlets covered the awards the next morning and complimented Handler’s performance as emcee without ever mentioning any of these remarks. Just as the overwhelmingly affluent white audience laughed and applauded.
Not surprisingly, people of color and white people of good conscience were upset by Handler’s behavior at one of the most prestigious book award ceremonies in the United States. Articles and blogs were written. Twitter came alive over it. Finally, Handler apologized on Twitter with the usual non-apology—“my failed attempt at humor.” People rightly asked, “In what world are these things supposed to be funny?”
Then, the defenders came out. Online comment after comment after tweet after Facebook post after blog post of “What’s the big deal?”, “race-baiting,” “Get a sense of humor.” I’m used to them. We all are. Every time someone wealthy, famous, and white (and usually male) says or does something racist or misogynist, the defenders come out in force with these same comments. The comments include many that are much worse and sometimes downright foul, but I won’t detail those here because they’re from real trolls, while I think the comments I have listed are sometimes, at least, from people who genuinely don’t see or understand the racist or misogynistic content of the controversial remarks.
People try to explain why these remarks are offensive. I know I have many times. Usually without success. Perhaps it will help if I spell it out this time, looking at the watermelon joke, which caused the most uproar because Handler dragged it out for several minutes and included Cornell West, Toni Morrison, and Barack Obama. Woodson is a gifted young writer who has twice before been a finalist for this ultimate award. Winning it should have been a pinnacle point for her entire career. At that moment, this wealthy, successful, white male writer in her own specific field (children’s literature) reminded her publicly that, no matter how much she achieved, she would always be Other and lesser in his and everyone else’s eyes.
When you face these kinds of insults and injuries in little and big ways every day—even if the people who say or do them are truly unaware of the offense (and let’s be honest, they usually know quite well)—it takes a toll on you. Then, if you object, if you try to say, “This is wrong,” others who share the offender’s views tell you not to take it so seriously—“Get a sense of humor.”
I want to turn that back on them. To all those people who think it’s funny to insult and stereotype people of other backgrounds and genders, you get a sense of humor. Learn what’s really funny and not just cruel and embarrassing and referencing for fun traumas that have been inflicted on whole peoples. Grow some intelligence and wit, instead of making watermelon jokes when someone wins one of the highest awards in the American literary world.

Ferguson—What Kind of a Nation Do We Choose to Be?

I have been watching events unfold in Ferguson, Missouri, the past few days, as has the world. I know that troubled suburb of St. Louis, have a friend who recently moved there, have driven past or through it many times.  Ferguson and St. Louis occupy the northeastern corner of Missouri a straight shot across the state on I-70 from where I live in a similar area of Kansas City in the northwestern corner of the state.


I live on the “wrong” side of Troost Avenue in Kansas City, the poor side, the dark side, of this street that divides this city, racially and socioeconomically. The people in my neighborhood and the neighborhoods around us were suffering severely for at least three years before the economic crisis hit the stock market and was finally declared. It seems we only worry about the economy when it adversely affects the well-off. What does that say about us as a country?


Where I live is similar to Ferguson where Michael Brown was killed, a street with a strip of businesses surrounded by working-class homes on all sides. I know what it’s like to have a SWAT team pull up and cordon off my neighborhood and block my driveway while armored and assault-weapon-armed men sweep through our backyard because of something that happened at a business up on Troost. I can imagine the plight of the people who are being teargassed in their own driveways and yards because they just happen to live where something happened. That’s something I think people forget.  It’s mostly homes around there. Many of those people gathered around the body of Michael Brown when the police came in so hard and heavy that first day with guns and dogs were actually standing in their own or their neighbor’s yards. This is a whole community under siege by its own police force.


When the white men at the Bundy standoff, armed to the teeth, pointed loaded assault weapons at police and threatened them, no one shot them, and no one teargassed them. Apparently, that kind of behavior is saved for people of color in this country.


I remember the riots of the 1960s. More people would do well to remember them. If you’re not old enough or weren’t aware enough when they occurred, google them. And imagine them now, with the population in many cities much larger than it was then, with automatic weapons in the hands of much of the population, as they were not at that time. There is frustration, hopelessness, and anger of that immensity that is building in this country right now.


The riots of the 1960s were a wake-up call for the United States. As a country, we set up programs to deal with the poverty and hopelessness and racism that brought them about—programs that brought more people of color and people from poor backgrounds into the middle class than ever before, programs that brought medical care, nutritional care, education, job training and many other good things to what were essentially bad places to live one’s life.


In recent years, we’ve been dismantling the structure of safety-net services and programs that we set up after those riots, even as racism has become ever more overt and in-your-face in this country. Things have been peaceful through the decades of greed. No one’s been pitching bottles or breaking windows, though poor people and working-class people and people of color and women have been suffering. So we take—and take and take—from the poor and the working class and, now, even the middle class, and give it all to the wealthy and the corporations. We militarize our police forces and allow too many of them to think of the streets on which we live as a war zone in which they have the right to act as if they are an occupying army.  We allow racism, which had been forced underground at least, to rise up and blossom in front of us, on our television sets, in our state legislatures and governor’s mansions, in the United States Congress and Supreme Court. We don’t listen when people protest. The country turns its back.


My husband once knew someone who was writing a dissertation called “Violence Works.”  I’d like to think his friend’s analysis is wrong, but reality is slapping me in the face right now. People trying to peacefully protest a young man’s brutal death, with hands held high in the air, are teargassed and have their lives threatened by a police force that views them as enemy combatants.  If you look at the U.S.’s history, you’ll see plenty of proof of that dissertation’s thesis, as well. Basically, it is when people can’t take it any longer and erupt in violence that we, as a country, wake up and do something to improve the situation. Most of our social improvements have followed that chain of events.

When we wipe out program after program designed to help people pull themselves and their families out of poverty, we are playing with fire. When we ignore the damage the economy sustains from short-sighted greed until the damage spreads to the wealthy—and then provide bailouts only to the powerful—we say something about what kind of country we are and what we value. When we allow wealthy white men to threaten law enforcement officers with loaded weapons with impunity while teargassing unarmed African American mothers and children in or near their own homes, we say something about what kind of country we are and what we value. And that something is sour to the taste and bitter to the heart for a country founded on the ideals this country still claims to hold as its own. Maybe it’s time we took a look at what we truly value versus what we say we value. What kind of a country do we want to be? We are creating the future now.
REPLY TO COMMENTS ( because Blogger):
Sara Sue, thank you. It's terrifying to see this. Everyone should read about all the militarization of police forces in this country and the attitudes their leadership publicly espouse about our neighborhood streets being a war zone. In a time when violent crime of all types has dropped to its lowest levels in decades, they are arming for battle and treating the citizens whose taxes pay their salaries as enemy combatants in an occupied territory.

Unexpected Delay

I started a month-long series of posts for my long-running series, Books of Interest by Writers of Color, in honor of #diverselit and #WeNeedDiverseBooks after the early part of healing from surgery. One week in, unfortunately, I must take a week's hiatus because I've developed a post-surgical problem that requires me to keep my right arm elevated until I receive a custom-made compression sleeve. This means I can keep writing on the current novel by longhand, but can't use the computer.

So check back in a week for posts about Marjorie Agosin, Allison Hedge Coke, Richard Vargas, Frances Washburn, and more.

Sergio Troncoso—Books of Interest by Writers of Color

This is the second in a month-long series on #diverselit and #WeNeedDiverseBooks that I am offering as an addition to my long-running series, Books of Interest by Writers of Color.
Sergio Troncoso is one of the most interesting writers around. Author of essays, short fiction, and novels, Troncoso was born in El Paso, Texas, the son of Mexican immigrants who built their own house by hand with no running water or electricity in one of the poorest neighborhoods of the border city. He went on to graduate from Harvard and to study international relations and philosophy at Yale University where he now teaches as a resident faculty member of the Yale Writers’ Conference while living in Manhattan on the affluent West Side. That range of experience of communities from the poorest to the wealthiest informs and enriches his work, as does his extensive study in economics, politics, and literature. His writing is always intelligent and ambitious and often subversive.

His two most recent books are examples of this range. Troncoso’s first novel, The Nature of Truth, was published in a new, revised and updated edition in 2014. Rigoberto Gonzalez reviewing it for The El Paso Times said, “Sergio Troncoso’s The Nature of Truth single-handedly redefines the Chicano novel and the literary thriller.” I found The Nature of Truthan interesting cross between literary novel of ideas and thriller. The hero learns his famous academic supervisor is possibly a Nazi war criminal, as well as a serial sexual harasser and seducer of young undergraduate women. Still, he can't seem to find a way to bring the esteemed scholar to justice because the older man is too slippery. What can or should an honest man do to enact justice? This is an extremely well-written, ambitious novel of thought and action filled with suspense. A real page turner and thought provoker.

Troncoso also recently co-edited Our Lost Border: Essays on Life amid the Narco-Violence, a collection of essays on how the bi-national and bi-cultural existence along the United States-Mexico border has been disrupted by recent drug violence. Publishers Weekly called it an “eye-opening collection of essays.” The anthology won the Southwest Book Award and the International Latino Book Award. The authors featured in this collection are from the border areas of both Mexico and the United States, and the collection offers a multifaceted perspective on the infamous drug violence afflicting the border and the complicity of the United States and Mexico in creating and sustaining this monster.

I first encountered Troncoso’s work in his earlier collection of essays, Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, a luminous collection of thoughtful writing about his family’s battle with his wife’s breast cancer when their sons were toddlers, how their very different families reacted to this son of the Isleta barrio’s marriage to a daughter of upper-middle-class Jewish parents from New England, his own struggles with how to be a good father to his two sons and bring forward the strengths of his own upbringing without the drawbacks, among other fascinating topics. Lucid writing, rigorous self-examination, and a refusal to accept shibboleths without intensive questioning are hallmarks of this remarkable book.
He also has published a terrific autobiographical novel, From This Wicked Patch of Dust, which Kirkus Reviews named as one of the Best Books of 2012, and PEN/Texas shortlisted as the runner-up in its biannual Southwest Book Award for Fiction, while his first book, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories, won the Premio Aztlán Literary Prize and the Southwest Book Award.
Troncoso is a writer dealing with ambitious themes whose name should be much better known in American literary circles and is an example of the way so many writers of color doing high-quality creative work are too often shunted away from the mainstream of American literary critical attention because of assumptions that their work will simply not be worth the time to even consider. You will find links to buy all of his books on his website, where you will also find videos of talks, interviews, reviews, and his always-insightful blog. http://sergiotroncoso.com/

Sara Sue Hoklotubbe’s Sinking Suspicions—Books of Interest by Writers of Color

This is the first post in a month of #diverselit and #WeNeedDiverseBooks posts I am making. It seems a natural for me since I’ve long written a series of posts called Books of Interest by Writers of Color.


I’m a Cherokee poet and novelist who writes about a Cherokee protagonist, so people send me just about every novel written that has a major Indigenous character in it. A terrifying number of them are romances with generic spray-tanned hunks on the cover and love interests who are half-Cherokee, half-Navajo, half-Sioux, or just plain half-Indian (these authors don’t seem to know any other tribes exist) and written without the least tiny bit of knowledge of any of these different cultures. Recently, I received a non-romance novel written by a non-Native author with a Cherokee female protagonist. The blurbs made me hopeful, but once I started reading, it became apparent that the writer had done a little haphazard research online about the Cherokee to give “flavor” to her work. She got many of the most basic things wrong, but oddly enough had a few unusual things right. I don’t suppose I have to state that I won’t be reading any more of her books.


Then, along comes Sara Sue Hoklotubbe’s third Sadie Walela mystery, Sinking Suspicions, and my world is bright again. I could well talk about Hoklotubbe in my series on Literary Mystery Novelists and will tag this post that way, as well, because she writes so well and creates characters that live on the page. But her biggest strength is in her creation of Sadie’s background setting. Hoklotubbe brings to life the world of the Western Cherokee in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and its surrounding counties. Her protagonist, Sadie Walela, has been a rancher, a banker, a restaurant owner, and in Sinking Suspicions, is embarking on a career as a travel agent. Since Hoklotubbe is Cherokee and grew up in the same area as Sadie, she knows the land, the people, and the culture.


In Sinking Suspicions, Hoklotubbe writes about the modern Cherokee, the food, the dances, the small towns, the farms and ranches, the way people look out for one another and take care of each other, the respect for the elders and for family, the sense of humor, the sense of individualism within a sense of strong community of the Cherokee today. She even takes the timeworn trope of the person who claims to have a Cherokee princess for a grandmother and transforms it into something true and powerful.


This is the difference between an author who wants to use a people and their culture to add an exciting, singular touch to his book and writes mostly stereotypes and caricatures for his ethnic characters and an author who really knows what she’s writing about, whether from having lived it or from real research, which means getting to know the people as people and to know the culture through their eyes as a way of living and not an exotic artifact or simply searching on the internet among the stereotypes and (often) falsehoods that even (or perhaps especially) anthropologists have perpetuated.


In Sinking Suspicions, Sadie Walela heads to Hawaii to finalize her next career as a travel agent, leaving her lawman boyfriend, Lance Smith, alone and dissatisfied with her decision. The identity theft that affects Sadie’s aging Cherokee next-door neighbor, Buck Skinner, a World War II veteran and former horsebreaker, threatens his ownership of his family land and eventually leads to murder, conspiracy, and a rocky romance for Sadie. On the island, while worrying about Buck and Lance, Sadie becomes friends with a native Hawaiian family and learns enough about their culture and history to see real parallels with her own people. As tension mounts and Buck becomes a suspect in a murder case, an earthquake in Hawaii that disrupts communications and keeps Sadie from immediately returning to help Buck complicates the situation, leaving Sadie’s dear, old friend in grave danger, as well as threatening her new love. 

Sinking Suspicionsis a must-read for those who like to read about other cultures, for mystery fans, and for fans of good fiction in general.


Bio
Sara Sue Hoklotubbe is a Cherokee tribal citizen and the author of the award-winning Sadie Walela Mystery Series. She grew up on the banks of Lake Eucha in northeastern Oklahoma and uses that location as the setting for her mystery novels to transport readers into modern-day Cherokee life.


THE AMERICAN CAFÉ was awarded the 2012 WILLA Literary Award for Original Softcover Fiction by Women Writing the West, won the 2012 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Best Mystery, and was named 2012 Mystery of the Year by Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. The book was also named a finalist for the 2012 Oklahoma Book Awards and the 2011 ForeWord Book of the Year.  DECEPTION ON ALL ACCOUNTS won Sara the 2004 Writer of the Year Award from Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers.


Sara is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, Oklahoma Writers’ Federation, Inc., and Tulsa Night Writers. She and her husband live in Colorado.


Sinking Suspicionsis available for pre-order now. http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/Books/bid2500.htm As usual, I suggest my readers buy from the university press that published this book, even though the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The vast majority of writers of color are published only through small literary presses and university presses. Without them, we would only have a tiny handful of big-name writers of color available to us. Support them if you value #diverselit. 
REPLIES TO COMMENTS (because Blogger hates me):

I'm glad you're going to try Hoklotubbe, Anonymous. She's an excellent writer, and her books are very enjoyable.

Thanks, Sara Sue. I'm going to paste that offer up here also. For anyone who wants to pre-order Sinking Suspicions from the University of Arizona Press, they may use the promotional code FLR and get 20% off.

Books of Interest by Writers of Color—Allison Hedge Coke Edits Another Great Anthology, EFFIGIES II

Allison Hedge Coke is a prolific and acclaimed Indigenous writer who’s been discussed before on this blog. http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com/2011/09/books-of-interest-by-writers-of_27.html
Her own books of poetry and memoir include the American Book Award winner, Dog Road Woman, popular memoir, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer, and two Wordcraft Writer of the Year winners, Off Season City Pipe and Blood Run. Hedge Coke is also known for her fine work in editing series and anthologies of Indigenous writers, most recently and notably SING: Indigenous Poetry of the Americas, which was the first anthology of Indigenous writing from all the Americas.
One of the anthologies Hedge Coke edited in 2009 was Effigies, a strong collection of chapbooks from emerging Alaskan Native and Pacific Islander poets. Now, she has returned with a new collection of chapbooks from five emerging Indigenous poets of the continental United States, Effigies II: An Anthology of New Indigenous Writing Mainland North & South United States, 2014, from Salt Publications. Effigies II contains the poems of Lara Mann (Choctaw), Ungelbah Davila (Diné), Kateri Menominee (Anishinaabe), Kristi Leora (Onondaga), and Laura Da’ (Shawnee).

Ann Waldman says of this anthology, “Allison Hedge Coke has done it again, with her keen ear and eye: brought powerful new Native women's voices to our attention. Rigorous, powerful, brave, haunting, spirited.” LeAnne Howe also praises it. “These poems, fresh effigies carved by five young Native women cracked open my heart.  Read them when alone carefully swaddled in a warm blanket, or read them aloud at the kitchen table to all your relations, past and future.  But read them.”
The variety of poetic voices in this anthology is refreshing. These Native women’s voices are a powerful addition to the growing body of robust diversity that is modern, published Indigenous poetry (for the tribes have been voicing poetry for millennia). The poets of Effigies II bring their voices in the whispers, murmurs, fierce shouts, curses, blessings, lullabies, cries of passion, tears, and mourning. The breadth of life is to be found in these spirited offerings.
Although the poets in Effigies II are emerging poets coming into their own, the work in these pages is sure, deft, full of telling detail, rich in evocative imagery, and ringing with the music of language enriched by drawing on multiple heritages and cultures. These poems demand attention—Mann’s bittersweet tales of searching for roots for family and self; Davilah’s explorations of female sexuality, empowerment and exploitation; Menominee’s travels through ancient history and fairy tale with a postmodern sensibility; Leora’s work linking the modern world and its future with its beginnings through geologic process and creation stories; and the poems of Da’, which grieve for the atrocities, betrayals, and losses inflicted on her people.
Hedge Coke’s sure hand as editor can be seen in the ordering and juxtapositions which allow each poet’s work to feed and support that of the others. I highly recommend this collection to all with interest in new Indigenous voices and in a more nuanced approach to the idea of Indigenous writing, as well as to anyone who just loves to read lucid, lyrical, enchanting, and powerful poetry.
As usual, I suggest you order the book from the small press publisher, Salt Publications, which has a whole series of Indigenous books, Earthworks. Small press and university publishers bring most of the diversity in literature to the page. Without them, we would have a tiny handful of very famous writers of color published and no one else. If you value diverse literature, please support the presses that make it possible. http://saltpublishing.com/shop/proddetail.php?prod=9781844718955
As part of the whole #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement, I will devote a month of twice-weekly posts to my long-running Books of Interest by Writers of Color series while recuperating from some surgery mid-July to mid-August (because I'd already planned this and because I just think it's that important, so I'm going to do it anyway). During that month, I may have some extra posts by other writers and critics featuring yet more #diverselit. So stand by for some remarkable writers that you may never have heard of before.