The University of Arizona Press
When: Monday, April 24, 2023, 5 pm PT / 6 pm MT/ 7 pm CT/ 8 pm ET / 9 pm in Puerto Rico
Where: Free on Zoom, Register in advance here
Nylda Dieppa of Las Comadres & Friends National Latino Book Club will interview poet Cynthia Guardado. Guardado’s recent book, Cenizas, is also the April Book of the Month for the book club.
Cenizas offers an arresting portrait of a Salvadoran family whose lives have been shaped by the upheavals of global politics. The speaker of these poems—the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants—questions the meaning of homeland as she navigates life in the United States while remaining tethered to El Salvador by the long shadows cast by personal and public history. Cynthia Guardado’s poems give voice to the grief of family trauma, while capturing moments of beauty and tenderness. Maternal figures preside over the verses, guiding the speaker as she searches the ashes of history to tell her family’s story. The spare, narrative style of the poems are filled with depth as the family’s layers come to light.
Cynthia Guardado (she/her/hers) is a Los Angeles–born Salvadoran poet and professor. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Cenizas and ENDEAVOR. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, U.S. Latinx Voices in Poetry, and The Wandering Song. Guardado won the Concurso Binacional De Poesía Pellicer-Frost in 2017, and Cenizas was a finalist for the National Poetry Series in 2019.
