Deborah Paredez

Deborah Paredez is a poet, performance scholar, and cultural critic. She is author of the critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory and of the poetry collection This Side of Skin. Her writing has appeared in many publications including The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, and the anthology, Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees. She also serves as Series Co-Editor of the CantoMundo Poetry Book Prize awarded annually to a collection by a Latinx poet. The title of Deborah Paredez’s second poetry collection refers to the year 1970–the “year of the Metal Dog” in the lunar calendar. It was the year of her birth, the year her father prepared to deploy to Vietnam along with many other Mexican-American immigrant soldiers, and a year of tremendous upheaval across the United States. Images from iconic photographs and her father’s snapshots are incorporated, fragmented, scrutinized, and reconstructed throughout Year of the Dog (BOA Editions) as Paredez recalls untold stories from a war that changed her family and the nation. In poems and lamentations, Paredez recontextualizes historical moments of the Vietnam era, never forgetting the outcry and outrage that women’s voices have carried across time. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, noted “Paredez has a gift for storytelling through form. This is an astonishing book.”