Fictionalized poems that embody the reality of life in twentieth-century China through the voice of Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong.

From the Diary of Madame Mao is a poetry collection of fictionalized diary entries in the voice of Jiang Qing, wife of Mao Zedong and a vilified leader of the “Gang of Four," a Maoist political faction which wielded unchecked and violent suppression of dissent during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76). The haunting voice in this collection recounts the events of twentieth-century China through the imagined inner thoughts of Jiang, a liberated woman in a male-dominated society who struggled to fend for herself but then, upon gaining totalitarian power, became “mentally ill.” Maria Teresa Ogliastri—who has lived under authoritarian regimes in Venezuela for more than two decades— “opts for compassion” in her portrayal of this infamous public figure, conveying the full complexity of human emotion and experience in her singular lyric voice.

María Teresa Ogliastri was born in Los Teques, Venezuela, and lives in Caracas. The author of five collections of poems, she has been featured at poetry festivals throughout Latin America, and her poems appear in several anthologies of contemporary Venezuelan poetry. She has taught philosophy at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, as well as worked as a researcher and editor at public institutions such as the Venezuelan National Library, the Caracas Museum of Contemporary Art, and Fundación Cultural Fundarte. Yvette Neisser is an award-winning poet and founder of the DC-Area Literary Translators Network (DC-ALT). Her poems, translations, and essays have appeared in Foreign Policy in Focus, Tikkun, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Split This Rock’s The Quarry. She has taught writing and translation at George Washington University, The Writer’s Center (Bethesda, MD), and other institutions. She lives just outside of Washington, DC. Patricia Bejarano Fisher is a former Spanish instructor and learning materials developer at the University of Maryland. Her translations include poems in Laura Shovan’s The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary; Bridges, a trilingual collection of poems by Lidia Kosk in Polish, English, and Spanish (unpublished); and the co-translation of Maria Teresa Ogliastri’s South Pole/Polo Sur.