An Evening With Sandra Cisneros & Jan Beatty: On Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo

Jan Beatty is a poet. Her books include The Body Wars, Jackknife: New and Collected Poems, The Switching/Yard, and the chapbooks Ravage and Ravenous. She also wrote Comets, a collection of essays about gender and censorship. Beatty’s work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, BuzzFeed, North American Review, and The Best American Poetry. American Bastard: A Memoir (Red Hen Press) chronicles her search for her birth parents, a journey that compelled her to traverse literal continents – and continents of desire – as she finds her birth father, a Canadian hockey player and winner of three Stanley Cups, and her birth mother, a working-class woman from Pittsburgh. Issues of class and struggle run throughout, with a link between identity and blood history a driving force of her experience. Beatty writes through complete erasure: loss of name and history, and a culture based on the currency of gratitude as payment from the adoptee. American Bastard sandblasts the exaltation of adoption in Western culture and the myth of the “chosen baby.” Presidential Inaugural Poet and author Richard Blanco said that “American Bastard dares and succeeds at reimagining and redefining memoir as a genre where stream of consciousness meets essay, meets magical realism, meets reportage, meets poetry, to create an epic mosaic only possible through the literary genius of Jan Beatty.”

Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, performer, and artist whose work explores the lives of the working class. Her novel The House on Mango Street is required reading in middle schools, high schools, and universities across the country and has sold more than six million copies. Her awards include NEA fellowships in poetry and fiction, a MacArthur fellowship, the PEN America Literary Award, and the National Medal of Arts. Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo (Vintage, dual-language edition) tells the story of Corina, who left her Mexican family in Chicago to pursue her dream of becoming a writer in the cafés of Paris. Instead, she spent her brief time there running out of money and lining up with other immigrants to call home from a broken pay phone. But the months of befriending panhandling artists in the métro, sleeping on crowded floors, and dancing tango at underground parties are bathed in a certain glow, because of her intense friendships with Martita and Paola. Over the years the women have dispersed to different continents, falling out of touch and out of mind – until a rediscovered letter brings Corina’s days in Paris back with breathtaking immediacy. Publishers Weekly noted that Cisneros’ “language and rhythm of her prose reverberate with Corina’s longing for her youth and unfulfilled promise. The author’s fans will treasure this.”