Poetry in Dangerous Times: Two Women, Two Worlds (A Dialogue and New & Selected Poems)
Poetry in Dangerous Times: Two Women, Two Worlds brings together two of America's most fearless literary voices. Demetria Martínez's and Susan Sherman's timely and intimate conversation spans decades, movements, and genres.
Part memoir, part retrospective, and wholly poetic, this collection opens with a dialogue between the two authors. It then unfolds into a generous offering of new and selected poems from each. Martínez and Sherman explore the intersections of poetry and protest, weaving personal testimony with political reality from the 1960s through the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s to today. This is not just a poetry collection-it is a call to conscience.
Author: Demetria MartÃnez, Susan Sherman
Publisher: Casa Urraca Press
Published: 09/02/2025
Pages: 174
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.39lbs
Size: 7.81h x 5.06w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9781956375336
About the Author
Martínez, Demetria: - Demetria Martínez, writer, poet, activist, and journalist, covered religion for the Albuquerque Journal and was a national news editor and a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter. Her widely translated novel Mother Tongue, set during the Sanctuary Movement, won a Western States Book Award. The novel was inspired by her 1987 indictment on charges of conspiracy in connection with allegedly transporting Central American refugees into the United States. The U.S. government attempted to use her poem "Nativity: For Two Salvadoran Women, 1986-1987" against her. A jury acquitted her on First Amendment grounds. Martínez is the author of numerous poetry collections and the short story collection The Block Captain's Daughter (which received the 2013 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation). Her essay collection, Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana, won an International Latino Book Award. She has also received the Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature.Sherman, Susan: - Susan Sherman is a poet, playwright, essayist, and editor and co-founder of IKON magazine. In the sixties, she was a poetry editor for The Nation and a poetry editor and theater critic for The Village Voice. She taught at the Free School of New York and the Alternate U., edited the first series of IKON magazine, and opened IKONbooks, a bookstore which served as a cultural and movement center. In the 1970s, she became active in the feminist and the gay liberation movements. In the 1980s, she reintroduced IKON as a feminist magazine. Sherman has had twelve off-off-Broadway productions and published her memoir, America's Child: A Woman's Journey Through the Radical Sixties, in 2007 to critical acclaim. She has published seven collections of poetry. She has also published a book of short fiction, Nirvana on Ninth Street, and a collaborative book of dialogue and poetry, We Stand Our Ground, with Kimiko Hahn and Gale P. Jackson. She has received the University Poetry Prize from UC Berkeley, a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts for Creative Nonfiction Literature, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship for Poetry, a Puffin Foundation Grant, a Creative Artist's Public Service Grant for poetry, and editors' awards from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines and the New York State Council on the Arts.