Melania Luisa Marte is a Dominican-American writer, poet, and musician from New York. Her viral poem “Afro-Latina” was featured by Instagram on their IGTV for National Poetry Month and has garnered over nine million views. Her work has also been featured by Ain’t I Latina?, AfroPunk, The Root, Teen Vogue, Telemundo, Remezcla, PopSugar, Refinery29, and elsewhere. She currently lives with her partner and child between the Dominican Republic and Texas.

“We, children of plátanos, always gotta learn to play in everyone else’s backyard and somehow feel at home.”

Poet and musician Melania Luisa Marte opens PLANTAINS AND OUR BECOMING by pointing out that  Afro-Latina is not a word recognized by the dictionary. But the dictionary is far from a record of the truth. What does it mean, then, to tend to your own words and your own record—to build upon the legacies of your ancestors?

In this imaginative, blistering poetry collection, Marte looks at the identities and histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti to celebrate and center the Black diasporic experience. Through the exploration of themes like self-love, nationalism, displacement, generational trauma, and ancestral knowledge, this collection uproots stereotypes while creating a new joyous vision for Black identity and personhood.

Moving from New York to Texas to the Dominican Republic and to Haiti, this collection looks at the legacies of colonialism and racism but never shies away from highlighting the beauty—and joy—that comes from celebrating who you are and where you come from.

Jennifer Maritza McCauley is a writer, poet, and university professor. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in prose, 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. She has received awards from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, Academy of American Poets and Best of the Net and she has received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, was a finalist for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in fiction and longlisted for the Aspen Words Prize and the Reading the West Book Awards.

The Novel is: WHEN TRYING TO RETURN HOME: STORIES

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. (From the publisher) (Counterpoint Press)

MELANIA LUISA MARTE and JENNIFER MARITZA MCCAULEY in conversation with Karis McPherson, BUILDING BRIDGES PANEL 4