The Halo-Halo Review is pleased to interview authors in the aftermath of their books’ releases. This issue’s featured authors include Luisa A. Igloria.
What is your most recent book?
CAULBEARER: Poems
(Immigrant Writing Series Prize)
Who published and when was it released?
Black Lawrence Press; August 2024
What has been the response/what has surprised you most about the response?
There's been a wonderfully positive response to this book!
In January, my publisher informed me that they'd do another print run. It's been fun to read at various events and programs both in person and virtually, sometimes together with other poet friends.
At in-person programs, like in early April at my Chicago book launch events, it was so affirming to hear which poems made some of the most powerful connections to readers (including a few who just happened to walk into the event)— the erasure poems, the manananggal poem; the poem I wrote on Magellan's slave and interpreter Enrique (Black Henry), my poem on Baguio City as a colonial hill station in which, my discussant M.G. Bertulfo astutely perceived, I do not outright name the American architect who drew up the city plans— which gesture she then interpreted as a strategy disruptive of the colonial tendency to write over indigenous lands and territories.
I'd love to bring Caulbearer to more audiences, classrooms, and poetry programs.
Tell me something not obvious or known about the book.
Perhaps this isn't immediately obvious— unless you go to the page listing my book at Black Lawrence Press: there is a study/reading/teaching guide which I created, and it's downloadable and printable from there (free); my youngest daughter Gabriela did all the artwork for it. I also have printed copies (in color) which I bound by hand; I sell them at cost, plus shipping (you can DM me).
Poetry Daily also asked me to write about the title poem from my book, as part of their "What Sparks Poetry" series.
What are you working on right now?
I'm reviewing and polishing 2 new poetry manuscripts that I started sending out in the middle of last year; they've placed finalist or received "highly commended" or "manuscript of exceptional merit," which tells me that they're making connections to readers.
I'm beginning to work more in earnest on a memoir-in-essays that's been simmering in the back of my mind for many years.
Also, I've been doing more visual art lately— collage, watercolors, book-binding.
*****
Poet, writer, and translator Luisa A. Igloria is the winner of the 2023 Immigrant Series Prize for poetry (Black Lawrence Press) for Caulbearer (2024). She is the author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Co-Winner, 2019 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Prize, Southern Illinois University Press, 2020), The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018), and 12 other books. She was the inaugural recipient of the 2015 Resurgence Poetry Prize, UK—the world’s first major award for ecopoetry (now known as the Ginkgo Prize), selected by a panel headed by former UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion. She is lead editor, along with co-editors Aileen Cassinetto and Jeremy S. Hoffman, of Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States (Paloma Press, September 2023). Luisa is a Louis I. Jaffe Professor of English and Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Old Dominion University; she also leads workshops for and is a member of the board of The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk. During her appointed term as 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-22), Emerita, the Academy of American Poets awarded her one of twenty-three Poet Laureate Fellowships in 2021, to support a program of public poetry projects. Author Links: www.luisaigloria.com and https://linktr.ee/thepoetslizard
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