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Gloria Anzaldua Book Prize, National Women's Studies Association, 2009

In the early twentieth century, three women of color helped shape a new world of ethnographic discovery. Ella Cara Deloria, a Sioux woman from South Dakota, Zora Neale Hurston, an African American woman from Florida, and Jovita González, a Mexican American woman from the Texas borderlands, achieved renown in the fields of folklore studies, anthropology, and ethnolinguistics during the 1920s and 1930s. While all three collaborated with leading male intellectuals in these disciplines to produce innovative ethnographic accounts of their own communities, they also turned away from ethnographic meaning making at key points in their careers and explored the realm of storytelling through vivid mixed-genre novels centered on the lives of women.

In this book, Cotera offers an intellectual history situated in the "borderlands" between conventional accounts of anthropology, women's history, and African American, Mexican American and Native American intellectual genealogies. At its core is also a meditation on what it means to draw three women—from disparate though nevertheless interconnected histories of marginalization—into conversation with one another. Can such a conversation reveal a shared history that has been erased due to institutional racism, sexism, and simple neglect? Is there a mode of comparative reading that can explore their points of connection even as it remains attentive to their differences? These are the questions at the core of this book, which offers not only a corrective history centered on the lives of women of color intellectuals, but also a methodology for comparative analysis shaped by their visions of the world.

Rediscovers the crucial role that women played in the influential Negritude movement.

The Negritude movement, which signaled the awakening of a pan-African consciousness among black French intellectuals, has been understood almost exclusively in terms of the contributions of its male founders: Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon G. Damas. This masculine genealogy has completely overshadowed the central role played by French-speaking black women in its creation and evolution. In Negritude Women, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting offers a long-overdue corrective, revealing the contributions made by the women who were not merely integral to the success of the movement, but often in its vanguard.

A bold, collective portrait of the sustaining force of art while aging

Nick of Time celebrates the artistic community of the Twin Cities and the wisdom that comes with age. Bringing together the voices of women creatives over the age of sixty-five, this collection is as varied as the artists’ vocations, spanning from narrative prose to poetry, essay, monologue, letters, historical reflection, and more. As the contributors examine their lived experiences, hopes and regrets, joy and grief while traversing their last decades of life, they serve as a guiding beacon for others navigating the intersection of creativity and aging—as well as a ballast against its inevitable challenges. They write with refreshing honesty about feeling invisible in older age, receiving late recognition, or being dismissed as hair turns gray and wrinkles appear. Their openness provides strength and support for us all.

A beautiful collection of pieces from established and emerging writers, painters, singers, photographers, musicians, playwrights, dancers, sculptors, and beyond, Nick of Time traces the contours of both the commonalities and the differences that can be found in the creative life of an aging artist. This generous book is a provocative meditation on finding power in age, demonstrating that creativity is an integral part of a full life as well as a lifelong pursuit.

Contributors: Shari Albers, Hend Al-Mansour, Hazel Belvo, Chris Cinque, Venus de Mars, Julia Dinsmore, Mary Moore Easter, Jan Elftmann, Georgia A. Greeley, Kathryn Haddad, Kim Hines, Carolyn Holbrook, Adar Kahin, Deborah Keenan, Amoke Kubat, Fiona McCrae, Teresa Ortiz, Rebecca Pavlenko, Marcie R. Rendon, Joyce Sutphen, Suzanne Thao, JoAnn Verburg, Diane Wilson, Mieko Yamazaki.

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Spanning almost four decades, Dionne Brand’s poetry has given rise to whole new grammars and vocabularies. With a profound alertness that is attuned to this world and open to some other, possibly future, time and place, Brand’s ongoing labors of witness and imagination speak directly to where and how we live and reach beyond those worlds, their enclosures, and their violences.

Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems begins with a new long poem, the titular Nomenclature for the Time Being, in which Dionne Brand’s diaspora consciousness dismantles our quotidian disasters. In addition to this searing new work, Nomenclature collects eight volumes of Brand’s poetry published between 1982 and 2010 and includes a critical introduction by the literary scholar and theorist Christina Sharpe.

Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems features the searching and centering cantos of Primitive Offensive; the sharp musical conversations of Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia; and the documentary losses of revolutions in Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, in which “The street was empty/with all of us standing there.” No Language Is Neutral reads language, coloniality, and sexuality as a nexus. Land to Light On writes intimacies and disaffections with nation, while in thirsty a cold-eyed flâneur surveys the workings of the city. In Inventory, written during the Gulf Wars, the poet is “the wars’ last and late night witness,” her job is not to soothe but to “revise and revise this bristling list/hourly.” Ossuaries’ futurist speaker rounds out the collection and threads multiple temporal worlds—past, present, and future.

This masterwork displays Dionne Brand’s ongoing body of thought—trenchant, lyrical, absonant, discordant, and meaning-making. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems is classic and living, a record of one of the great writers of our age.

The first English-language translation of Rosabetty Muñoz’s vital and innovative poetry from across her extraordinary body of work

Rosabetty Muñoz is one of Chile’s most acclaimed and innovative contemporary poets. Her poems highlight the lives of girls and women on the islands of the Chilean archipelago, portraying the hardships they encounter in this often-overlooked region of the world. In this meticulous and compelling translation from Elena Barcia, Nothing Like Paradise offers a collection of selected works from across Muñoz’s oeuvre, offering a close look into the breadth and emotional intensity of her poetry.

These poems depict the wounds inflicted by the Pinochet dictatorship, foreign invasions, sexual exploitation, the incursions of global capitalism, and political exile. Renowned for her powerful use of multiple voices and striking images, Muñoz channels the thoughts and emotions of the islands’ female inhabitants, bringing immediacy and drama to their stories and transforming readers into their witnesses and confidants. Her poems invite us to confront pain and injustice with empathy and to turn understanding into a collective act of compassion and resistance.

The Nuyorican Poets Café has for the past forty years provided a space for multicultural artistic expression and a platform for the articulation of Puerto Rican and black cultural politics. The Café’s performances—poetry, music, hip hop, comedy, and drama—have been studied in detail, but until now, little attention has been paid to the voices of its women artists. Through archival research and interview, Nuyorican Feminist Performance examines the contributions of 1970s and ’80s performeras and how they challenged the Café’s gender politics. It also looks at recent artists who have built on that foundation with hip hop performances that speak to contemporary audiences. The book spotlights the work of foundational artists such as Sandra María Esteves, Martita Morales, Luz Rodríguez, and Amina Muñoz, before turning to contemporary artists La Bruja, Mariposa, Aya de León, and Nilaja Sun, who infuse their poetry and solo pieces with both Nuyorican and hip hop aesthetics.

Brockman-Campbell Book Award for Poetry, Honorable Mention

Mackenzie Kozak examines the complex question of whether or not to bear children. Through a series of untitled American sonnets, the poems speak to themes of origin and desire, noting the shame that can accompany such a decision. Many poetry collections speak to the varied griefs of becoming a mother, losing a child, or being unable to have a child, but this collection gives specific voice to another grief that feels unspeakable: the possible conclusion of not wanting to be a mother.

no swaddle reads as a sort of meditation on theme, its repeated form mirroring the spiraling nature of indecision and reconsideration of the same major question alongside its continuous struggle to name. In the end, this grappling with elements of grief and shame becomes a way of moving toward greater agency and fulfillment.