In Conversation: Pablo Medina & Achy Obejas

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.

Cuban-born American poet Pablo Medina is the author of 19 books, including The Cuban Comedy: A Novel, Soledades (poems in Spanish), The Island Kingdom: Poems, and The Man Who Wrote On Water: Poems. His critically acclaimed translations include Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York (with Mark Statman) and Alejo Carpentier’s seminal novel The Kingdom of This World. The Foreigner’s Song: New and Selected Poems (Tiger Bark Press) is a type of aural retrospective. Medina reaches back to his first published book of poems, Pork Rind and Cuban Song (1975), culls from five others, and releases 19 new works that open with “That Dream Again.” It’s a fitting title to start the book. Not only does Medina mention dreams in a number of his poems, but he also charges his poems with a dreamlike quality – one that leads readers to a place where familiarity and certainty surrender to strangeness and reflection.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado is the author of the poetry collections Relinquenda and Matria. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets, Narrative, Gulf Coast, and Creative Nonfiction, among others. Her poetry has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2018, The Wandering Song, In Plein Air, Misrepresented People, Poeta Soy (Ministry of Education of El Salvador, 2019), and Jardín de sangre. Co-founder of Kalina Press, Lytton Regalado is author, editor, and/or translator of more than 15 Central American-themed books. She is also chief editor at LapisuchaMagazine.com (a literary magazine dedicated to the Salvadoran community) and an assistant editor at SWWIM, Supporting Women Writers in Miami.