Sandra Cisneros & Joy Harjo: A Conversation

Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, and artist. She is the author of Bad Boys, My Wicked Wicked Ways, Loose Woman, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, The House on Mango Street, Caramelo, Have You Seen Marie?, and Bravo, Bruno. Her most recent books are A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, illustrated with photographs, and Puro Amor, in a dual-language edition translated by Liliana Valenzuela and featuring illustrations by the author. She is a citizen of both the United States and Mexico. Woman Without Shame: Poems (Knopf) is Cisneros’ first book of poetry in 28 years. With dozens of never-before-seen poems, the collection includes songs, elegies, and declarations that chronicle her pilgrimage toward rebirth and the recognition of her prerogative as a woman artist. These bluntly honest and often humorous meditations on memory, desire, and the essential nature of love blaze a path toward self-awareness. For Cisneros, Woman Without Shame is the culmination of her search for home – in the Mexico of her ancestors and her own heart.

Ruth Behar is the author of several travel books, including Translated Woman, The Vulnerable Observer, An Island Called Home, and Traveling Heavy. Other works include Everything I Kept/Todo lo que guardé, a bilingual book of poems; the middle-grade novels Lucky Broken Girl and Letters from Cuba; and the children’s picture book Tía Fortuna’s New Home. Behar will be at Miami Book Fair 2022 to moderate a conversation with Sandra Cisneros, who is presenting Woman Without Shame: Poems (Knopf), her first book of poetry in 28 years, and three-term United States poet laureate Joy Harjo (Virtual), presenting two new books celebrating her 50-year body of work: Catching the Light (Why I Write) (Yale University Press) and Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years (W. W. Norton & Company).

Joy Harjo has published nine poetry collections, most recently An American Sunrise, and Crazy Brave: A Memoir, and edited When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry and Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry. She is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and the first Native American to serve as U.S. poet laureate. In Poet Warrior: A Memoir (W. W. Norton & Company), she invites readers to travel along her “poet-warrior” road. Harjo listens to ancestors and family stories, the poetry and music that she first encountered as a child, and the messengers of a changing earth – owls, resilient desert plants, and a smooth green snake curled up in surprise. Here, she celebrates the influences that shape her poetry, including Audre Lorde, N. Scott Momaday, Walt Whitman, Muscogee stomp dance call-and-response, and Navajo horse songs. Moving fluidly between prose, song, and poetry, Harjo grieves at the loss of her mother, reckons with the theft of her ancestral homeland, and sheds light on the rituals that nourish her as an artist, mother, wife, and community member.