Blast from the Poetry Past: 1990

Gary Soto published A Fire in My Hands, the first major Latino poetry collection for young people in 1990.

Then in 1996, the first mainstream Latina poet for young people, Pat Mora, published Confetti: Poems for Children.

Contemporary Connections
I am absolutely thrilled that we have so many new Latino/a voices writing poetry for young people today like Margarita Engle, Guadalupe Garcia McCall, Francisco X. Alarcon, Jorge Argueta, for example. And more by Gary Soto and Pat Mora on a regular basis, of course. Check out these new titles by Latino/a poets coming out this year in 2013:

1.    Ada, Alma Flor and Isabel F. Campoy. 2013. Yes! We Are Latinos. Ill. by David Diaz. Watertown, MA: Charlesbridge.
2.    Argueta, Jorge. 2013. Tamalitos: Un poema para cocinar/A Cooking Poem. Ill. by Domi. Toronto: Groundwood.
3.    Engle, Margarita. 2013. The Lightning Dreamer. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
4.    Engle, Margarita. 2013. Mountain Dog. New York: Holt.

And don’t forget to mark your calendars for the annual celebration of El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Children’s Day/Book Day) on April 30.

P.S. The all-knowing Lee Bennett Hopkins tells me that there was an earlier work of Latino poetry published for teens back in 1977: The Yellow Canary Whose Eye is So Black: Poems of Spanish Speaking Latin America edited and translated by Cheli Duran and published by Macmillan.

Posting by Sylvia M. Vardell © 2013. All rights reserved.

Image credits: BarnesandNoble