Thursday, April 25, 2013

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

2 comments:

Linda B said...

Gary Soto filled a place in my classroom for years, not just for the cultural aspect but because he spoke for adolescents too. I don't have all of the newer ones, but do have some. Thanks as always for the wonderful lists, Sylvia.

Laurina Cashin said...

All these voices bring us so much through their words.