I wrote bilingual poetry after my African American mother and her African American friend, Kathy, drove adolescent me from Guadalajara, Mexico to Durango, Durango for summer school.
I wrote poetry after my step granddad filled my ears with the improvisational jazz of Dexter Gordon and Miles Davis.
I wrote multilingual poetry after my failed attempt at foreign exile left words lingering in French.
I wrote bilingual poetry during the revolutionary years of Central America when U.S. counterrevolution left the cars in L.A.’s Koreatown with bumper stickers shouting Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala.
I wrote multilingual poetry the year Luis Enrique Mejía Godoy gave his concert for peace in Bovard Auditorium at USC.
And the years Eddie Santiago, Lalo Rodriguez, and el Gran Combo de Puerto Rico played at Hollywood Palladium.
And the year J. California Cooper, Paule Marshall, Sonia Sanchez, Michelle T. Clinton, Wanda Coleman, and Sherely Ann Williams read their poetry at California Afro-American Museum.
And then I stopped.
I put my poetry in a file folder and kept it there.
While I read middle school books.
While I conjugated verbs at night school with adult students in ESL.
While I graded high school essays.
While I raised kids.
While I wrote a novella and submitted it (unsuccessfully).
While I mastered creative nonfiction.
While I founded a literary magazine and published the poems of other writers.
While I wrote a memoir about writing bilingual and multilingual poetry.
And then it dawned on me – except for three poems I’d published at Arte Público Press, my poems were unpublished.
Why did I not publish my poetry during so many years?
Because it never occurred to me.
I hope that you will read Poetry, Poesía, Poésie in AfroDiaspora. Perhaps it’s because I wrote these poems during years of social crisis that their themes ring as if written today. I enjoyed going back and editing them. I think you will enjoy the read. And after reading, please leave a review on Goodreads.
Audrey Shipp 