In this stunning collection debuting June 15, 2026, writer Audrey Shipp resuscitates the poems of her poetic voice, Adriana – a young poet who resists the alienation of her birth city, Los Angeles. Using billingual and multilingual diction for an acercamiento (approachment) towards an African/Black diaspora she perceived as distant at the time, she offers “Poetry/Poesía/Poésie” that “cascades from las caderas / pushing from the thighs / como recién nacido (like a newborn).”
With these poems, I offer you the poetic voice I cultivated in years past. The poems in this collection, with the exception of two, were written in 1990-1991 under my pen name, Adriana Shipp. “Borderline/Nepantla/En Medio” and “I Slip Away Sometime” were written in 1980 when I began testing my poetic skills.
I am honored to have been published in Americas Review by Arte Público Press in 1991. And if I ever doubted I was a poet after that year, I had that publication to remind me. Under then publisher Nicolas Kanellos, Arte Público published “La Chanteuse de Jazz,” “La Pachanga,” and “Boca Oficial.” Contributing editors to the magazine in the edition in which I was published included distinguished writers Rudolfo Anaya, Victor Hernández Cruz, Nicholasa Mohr, and Tato Laviera. Before it was Americas Review, the magazine was called Revista Chicano-Riqueña which is no surprise to me. As an African American, I feel indebted to both Chicano and Puerto Rican writers for modeling a literary representation of living with two cultures/languages and how to walk a thin line on which one is constantly defining one’s cultural inheritance.
I am thankful to my elders for providing guidance and surrounding me with music, especially blues with its introspection and jazz with its improv. Jazz is my country, and it is the improvisational backbone of jazz that led me to write, to incorporate languages other than English in my writing, to follow call and response down the road to salsa, reggae, samba, juju music, and to find the grand diaspora of African and African descended people with whom I am connected.
Audrey Shipp 