Congratulations to my now published poets(!), participants in the "With Dedication" poetry writing workshop that I taught online across 5 Mondays in May and June. Their collection is a testament to their collective will to write: through pandemic, through protest.

Here is the introduction I wrote for the book:

Dear Reader,
 
Participants in our “With Dedication” workshop met across five weeks to discuss and write poetry that would recognize, celebrate, and elevate significant people in their families, communities, and lineages.
 
We met in an online classroom since public spaces were closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. At a time when social interaction was severely limited, we unmasked in front of our screens, and practiced praising our particular language—and each other.
 
Some of these poems took the form of dedication proposed by the workshop; others followed conduits that beckoned more urgently.
 
Shortly after our second meeting on May 25, Minneapolis police killed George Floyd. Video of the killing ignited protests across the nation and world.
 
Part of poetry’s power is that it can speak to readers of any time or place. Yet all poets write in specific times and places. It feels important to note the larger context of where and when these poems were crafted.
 
Langston Hughes’ “problem world” remains our world; the tools of reading, learning, and dreaming are yet how we “make our world anew.”
 
Our book opens with Ayoka Drake’s “Freedom” breaking the “rools” of spelling. Answering Hughes’ call to realize dreams “unfettered, free,” Drake demonstrates that poets must do the work of dismantling in order to find truth in new language. Each poet of “With Dedication” does this in their own way: making sense through the five senses, forging together a truly original collection.
 
The book closes with Abria Smith’s pair of “delicate copper leaf earrings,” an image that speaks of craft and achievement. Like the poetry herein, what was once “raw / Unimagined” has been “etched” into something tangible, beautiful, and enduring.
 
We hope that you enjoy reading, and that you find within, perhaps, seeds for your own language to grow from.

Each time I teach, I try to offer students the opportunity to make something--often a book--together. While the experience of the classroom or workshop is transient (and necessarily so), a book endures as a collective record and shared achievement. It is a community of pages. Here's a photo of some of the student, neighborhood, hospital, and workshop collections that I'm proud to have helped put together in recent years.

In a recent essay published in Harpers, Serena Williams reflected on the 2018 US Open incident when an umpire issued a series of penalties that cost Serena a critical game during the women’s final. She wrote, “I felt defeated and disrespected by a sport that I love—one that I had dedicated my life to and that my family truly changed, not because we were welcomed, but because we wouldn’t stop winning.”

This idea of changing the game through winning reminded me of a moment in Howard Bryant’s book The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron. As Bryant tells the story of the all-time homerun champ, he describes Aaron’s career-long struggle for respect: in the media, in his salary, and as a black athlete in America. Early in his career, Aaron sought to chase Stan Musial’s all-time record for hits. But as he became more socially and politically aware, Aaron recognized that in order to rewrite his own narrative ("Hank" was the sport media's nickname for him, meant to reinforce a false, simpleton image) and make others pay attention to him beyond just as a really good ballplayer, he would need to do something larger, he would need to put his own unavoidable stamp on greatness. Bryant wrote, “If [Aaron] corralled [the all-time home-run record], they would listen to him. They would all have no choice but to pay attention to what he had to say for the rest of his life.” (298)

In a sport that celebrates her excellence while not fully welcoming her presence, perhaps this is what drives Serena.

Venus and Serena aren’t the first champions of color in tennis, but they’re the ones who’ve most remade the game in their image--power, athleticism, intelligence, speed, and complexion--inspiring the next generation of American women, and black women among them.

Still, as the Greatest Tennis Player of All-Time goes after her record tying 24th grand slam title today, most of the country will be too caught up in college football and tomorrow's NFL chatter to notice.

That's too bad.

As the US Women’s National Soccer Team has proven once again, it matters whom we cheer for.

In a nation that continues to struggle to see the humanity in every human being, it matters whom we love.

I, too, wore braces when the sisters--and their megawatt smiles--debuted on the professional tour in theirs. I played doubles on a junior varsity tennis team outside Minneapolis, Minnesota--nary a jock among us--and my first impression of Venus and Serena was of how fun it was to watch them smack the crap out of the ball. I hadn’t watched much tennis on TV, but I wanted to watch them. They were American, my age. They were also goofy, awkward, best friends, and unabashedly themselves. I tracked their ascent up the tour rankings on the back page of my monthly Tennis Magazine. It was clear even then that they could bring a sea change to the sport--its power, its tactics, its historic lines.

Yet since she and her sister arrived on the professional tour--and even before--their presence in the sport was questioned, scrutinized, notable for how they were different, their success too often undermined or explained away. When they won, it was expected because they were bigger and stronger. When they faced each other, they were derided for not competing hard enough. When they pursued other professional interests, they were chided as disrespectful to the game for not fulfilling their talent. They were bumped, booed, and baited all along the way.

I'm 37 now, married with a baby, and I can't name any other athletes whom I've traversed most of my life cheering, still at the pinnacle of their sport.

Though she shows no signs of slowing, there may not be many more opportunities to watch the G.O.A.T. in her dominance.

Have you stopped to watch her yet? Have you stopped and said, Wow?

Maybe it matters that you do.

There's always a way to critique someone who challenges your idea of champion--they seem boastful, push fashion boundaries, act out their frustrations on court... Actually, those easily apply to Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic respectively. But we don't define the men by these faults; we brush them aside and instead revel in their game, their achievements, their contrasting characters.

I, too, see the ways Serena doesn't conform--isn't always easy to watch or to like--but I brush them aside. It's easy, actually. I go back again and again to that feeling, the joy of watching her play.

If we can't love Serena, what she has done and is doing, how are we going to love the next young woman or girl who comes along? Say, Alexis Olympia, Serena's daughter. What more will she have to prove?

Maybe Serena is staying in the game for her daughter. Or maybe she's still playing for us, because we need the chance to love more generously and expansively than we have so far.

The U.S. Open final is today at 4pm EST on ESPN.

There is still time.

When I lived in Caracas in 2006, I would walk from the residential Parque Central towers along the Avenida Urdaneta to get to my job teaching English. Avenida Urdaneta was always crowded with commuters and buhoneros who sold everything from lampshades to lingerie, while food carts offered hot dogs topped with fried eggs and potato chips.

Every few blocks, there was a newsstand where readers had a choice between Chavista papers or Opposition rags. Even the country’s largest newspapers fought to uphold objectivity under the polarizing leadership of Hugo Chavez--up for reelection that year.

Across seven months in Caracas, I interacted with all types. I taught English at night to adults. I got a part-time server position. I nannied for a family who lived in Chula Vista. I volunteered with a group of hospital clowns. I tagged along with Venezuelan friends to nearby beaches and Leones home games at the baseball stadium. I played futbolito in Parque Los Caobos and hiked the Avila on weekends.

In all this time living and working in Venezuela, I encountered advocates for both political sides equally. I listened as each argued their case for or against Chavez.

While Venezuelans could be eloquent in addressing me, I rarely heard dialogue or acknowledgement across the divide. Each person seemed to be telling me that there was one story to be told, the truth about their country. With the Venezuelan media split, anyone could subscribe to the news that affirmed their perspective.

Chavez was a powerful storyteller. He offered a narrative that promised an historic role for Venezuela: fulfilling Simon Bolivar’s dream of a united Latin America and opposing the interventionist U.S. imperialists. Chavez espoused a kind of destiny for his people with roots in the past and offering a future he called 21st Century Socialism--one that could raise all boats on the nation’s oil wealth. What’s more, and importantly, Chavez looked and sounded criollo criollo. Masses of Venezuelans looked at him and saw themselves.

On the other side, the Opposition--then led by Manuel Rosales--told a story of a nation beset by bureaucratic corruption, urban insecurity, dire economic forecast, and the dangerous implications of Chavez’ new friendships with the leaders of Iran and North Korea.

Chavez’ story won him reelection. While a record number of Venezuelans turned out to vote for the Opposition in 2006, a kind of blue and yellow wave, even more red hat wearing Venezuelans showed up to reelect Chavez.

Though the Opposition’s story held important truths, it seemed that those who voted for Chavez preferred the truths contained in his version.

Buoyed by oil, Chavez' administration built housing and schools, opened missions to assist poor communities across the country, recruited medical and university exchanges with Cuba, all sustaining the faith of his base.

But the price of oil dropped, the Opposition grew, and in 2013, Chavez died.
​
Chavez’ successor, Nicolas Maduro, has tried to carry forward Chavez’ legacy, but the seeds of 21st Century Socialism haven’t borne fruit. The country’s plunge into poverty is well documented. Millions of Venezuelans have fled their homeland, a nation rich in natural and cultural resources.

Maduro maneuvered to consolidate power by rewriting law, imprisoning political opponents, censoring the media, deploying armed troops to quell protests. All while using the U.S. as a foil to keep his followers riled up.

Maduro turned Chavez’ story from beacon to bludgeon, stoking fear and a divisive patriotism, while negating the existence of any other narrative. Before he earned the moniker "usurper" (of the presidency), he usurped the national story.

When Juan Guaidó swore himself in as interim president last week and was recognized internationally including by the U.S., Venezuela‘s Opposition reclaimed its side of the national narrative.

But what is Guaidó’s story? And how much authorship will the international community endeavor to take from the Venezuelan people who deserve to write their own way forward?

Three years ago, the U.S. presidential election gave me the feeling that we were living in Venezuela in 2006: a divided populace further polarized by a divided media. With social media, the fracturing has accelerated.

Consider the confrontational video taken recently on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. On The Daily podcast, they described it as a political rorschach: you see what you’re primed to see.

So we must invest in and protect the work of journalists who tell our national narratives with nuance and complexity. We also need leaders at both national and local levels who can author a more powerful, cohesive American narrative than the current White House occupant offers. And we must foster a culture of more empathic storytelling.

In my life, I’ve found this culture most consistently in literature, which Ezra Pound called “news that stays news.”

As I followed news of Venezuela’s political and economic descent from Boston, I reached out to Venezuelan poet Mariela Cordero whose poem “Cuerpo Público” gives an intimate, personal voice to the human fallout in Maduro’s Venezuela, one in which the daily reality seems ruled by “las jaurías.”

We need survivable spaces, like poetry or stories, in which to feel the pain of injustice: from Venezuelans in street protest to American government workers enduring the shutdown. Change begins in empathy.

Cordero's poem also pens its own solace, a meagerest place in which to harbor hope. In the last lines, Cordero writes:

Yo me acurruco / y espero que el amanecer / nos asombre con la evidencia / de que ambos, / este cuerpo donde habito y yo / sobrevivimos / a la larga noche / de las jaurías.

I curl into myself / and hope that morning / astonishes us with proof / that both / this body I inhabit and I /—survive—/ the long night / of the pack.

Today, I’m thinking about the Venezuelan people, hoping that their hope can endure. And that hope is a story we can all author going forward.

Back in 2009, I promoted Wonder/Wander on local cable-access shows: "Tu Opinion Cuenta" (with William Pena), "The Callaloo Express" (with Lynnette Laveau Save), and "El Show de Fernandito" (with Fernando Bossa). Below is the interview from "El Show de Fernandito" (7min 15sec; English and Spanish).

Each appearance was fun and forced me to find the language--in both languages--for talking about the book, the journey, and the reasons for both. At that time, I was waiting tables at Orinoco Kitchen in Brookline Village where we had a small display of Wonder/Wander books for sale. I rarely pushed them, but customers would browse and from time-to-time someone came to dine who was from Venezuela or had traveled Central America or had a son interested in Spanish language or who just identified with the spirit of the work and they would buy a copy from me, their waiter. I enjoyed that serendipitous sales approach. I never expected Wonder/Wander to climb the sales charts or be thrust on people whom it didn't interest. Instead, I think books are as diverse as people, and we need to find the ones that resonate with and inside of us. Even as I use social media as a promotions tool, I believe that books find their readers and readers find their books through much subtler channels: the same ones that connect us to friends or lovers.