In Conversation: On Home in Florida: LatinX Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness

Isvett Verde is a staff editor of The New York Times opinion section. She is also a contributor to Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness (University of Florida Press). The collection showcases what editor Anjanette Delgado calls “literatura del desarraigo,” a Spanish literary tradition. Home in Florida features fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by Verde, Richard Blanco, Jennine Capó Crucet, Ana Menéndez, Achy Obejas, and many others. These writers – first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants to Florida from places such as Cuba, Mexico, Honduras, Perú, Argentina, and Chile – reflect the diversity of Latinx experiences across the state. Together, they explore what exactly makes Florida home for those struggling between memory and presence.

Francine Birbragher-Rozencwaig (Chicago, Estados Unidos, 1965) – Historiadora del arte, curadora independiente y crítica de arte con una maestría en Historia del arte y un doctorado en Historia latinoamericana de la Universidad de Miami. Es editora colaboradora de las revistas ArtNexus y Letra Urbana. Desde 1989 escribe sobre arte contemporáneo para varias revistas y periódicos especializados y ensayos para monografías de artistas y catálogos de exposiciones. De 2008 a 2015, trabajó como curadora adjunta en The Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, de la Florida International University. Como curadora independiente, ha organizado más de cincuenta exposiciones en Estados Unidos y América Latina. Actualmente forma parte del consejo asesor de Friends of the Uffizi Gallery (Amigos de la Galería Uffizi) de  Florencia. Pertenece a varias organizaciones profesionales, incluida la Association of Art Critics (Asociación Internacional de Críticos de Arte), la College Art Association (Asociación de Arte Universitario), la Association for Latin American Art (Asociación de Arte Latinoamericano) y Art Table. Birbragher es autora del libro Humberto Castro, publicado por HCg, en el que recorre la vida y la obra de este artista plástico cubano reconocido internacionalmente.

Achy Obejas is a Cuban American writer, translator, and activist whose work focuses on personal and national identity. She is the author of The Tower of the Antilles: Short Stories, Ruins, Days of Awe: A Novel, and the poetry chapbook This is What Happened in Our Other Life. As a translator, she has worked with Wendy Guerra, Rita Indiana, Junot Díaz, and Megan Maxwell, among others. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Fifth Wednesday Journal, TriQuarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, and many other publications. She is currently a writer/editor for Netflix. Boomerang/Bumerán: Poetry/Poesía (Beacon Press) is a bilingual collection of lyrical poetry written in bold, mostly gender-free English and Spanish that addresses immigration, displacement, love, and activism. The book is divided into three sections: poems addressing immigration and displacement; those addressing love, lost and found; and verses focusing on action and on ways of addressing injustice and repairing the world. Obejas is also a contributor to Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness (University of Florida Press). The collection showcases what editor Anjanette Delgado calls literatura del desarraigo, a Spanish literary tradition.

Caridad Moro-Gronlier is a Cuban American lesbian poet born in Los Angeles to Cuban immigrant parents. She is the author of the chapbook Visionware, a contributing editor of Grabbed: Poets & Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing, and associate editor for SWWIM Every Day, an online daily poetry journal. Tortillera: Poems (Texas Review Press) is her debut collection. The word “tortillera” means lesbian in Español. The moniker is familiar to most Spanish-speaking cultures, but is especially particular to the Cuban experience. In most Cuban American households, to be called a tortillera is a catcall that whips through the air like a lash whose only intention is to wound, to scar. Here, Moro-Gronlier not only applies the term to herself, she owns it, drapes it over her shoulders and heralds her truth through candid, unflinching poems that address the queer experience of coming out while Cuban. The first half of the book immediately plunges the reader into the speaker’s Cuban American life on-the-hyphen through vivid, first-person narratives. The work contained within the collection befits its audacious title – bold, original and utterly without shame. Jenny Molberg, author of Refusal: Poems, celebrated it. “An unflinching, delicious, and fierce anthem to Cuban American and queer identities, Tortillera reclaims the homophobic slur of its title, engaging and subverting the canonical tradition of the love poem.”

Born in Los Angeles to exiled Cuban parents, journalist and writer Ana Menéndez – whose work has appeared the Miami Herald, Vogue, Bomb Magazine, The New York Times, Tin House, and in several notable anthologies – is the author of Adios, Happy Homeland!; The Last War: A Novel, Loving Che, and In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd. She is also a contributor to Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness (University of Florida Press). The collection showcases what editor Anjanette Delgado calls “literatura del desarraigo,” a Spanish literary tradition. Home in Florida features fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by Menéndez, Richard Blanco, Ariel Francisco, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Isvett Verde, and many others. These writers – first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants to Florida from places such as Cuba, Mexico, Honduras, Perú, Argentina, and Chile – reflect the diversity of Latinx experiences across the state. Together, they explore what exactly makes Florida home for those struggling between memory and presence.

Anjanette Delgado, a Puerto Rican writer and journalist, is the author of The Heartbreak Pill, winner of the Latino International Book Award, and The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and publications such as the Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Vogue, and The New York Times. She characterizes the work in Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness (University of Florida Press), as “literatura del desarraigo,” a Spanish literary tradition. Home in Florida features fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by Reinaldo Arenas, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Jaquira Díaz, Patricia Engel, Carlos Harrison, and many others. These writers – first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants to Florida from places such as Cuba, Mexico, Honduras, Perú, Argentina, and Chile – reflect the diversity of Latinx experiences across the state. Together, they explore what exactly makes Florida home for those struggling between memory and presence. Anjanette Delgado (Puerto Rico) – Escritora y periodista. Reside en Miami. Tiene una maestría en escritura creativa en la Universidad Internacional de la Florida. Ha publicado las novelas La píldora del mal amor (2009, Latino International Book Award) y La clarividente de la Calle Ocho (2014). Es editora de la antología Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness (University of Florida Press, 2021). Su obra ha sido incluida en numerosas antologías, así como en The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Vogue, Hostos Review, Boston Review, the Women’s Review of Books, The Hong Kong Review (de la cual fue editora), NPR y The New

Ariel Francisco is a poet and translator born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents and raised in Miami. His previous poetry collection is All My Heroes Are Broke. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, and The American Poetry Review. In Francisco’s A Sinking Ship Is Still a Ship (Burrow Press) the speakers in these hilarious and melancholy poems depict a rich and varied emotional landscape. They imagine themselves standing on ocean garbage patches, contemplate the crabgrass on traffic medians, and envision the beauty of a submerged Miami Beach. In one moment the strange becomes familiar, only to become strange again in the next stanza. Francisco’s second book of poems deals with climate change and the absurdities and difficulties of being a millennial Latinx in the Sunshine State. (This first edition includes side-by-side Spanish translations by José Nicolás Cabrera-Schneider.) Poet Richard Blanco praised it noting that ”Part satirist, part ecopoet, part elegist, but every bit a luminous poet, Ariel Francisco brilliantly voices the complex intersections of the physical, emotional, and natural landscapes that define our sense of place and belonging, as well as our feelings of alienation and ennui.”