With an Introduction by Mexican novelist Álvaro Enrigue, the Collection is the Product of PEN America’s “DREAMing Out Loud” Workshops for CUNY students
Enrigue at the 2016 Hay Festival courtesy of Andrew Lih under
PEN America today published an anthology of writings by young aspiring writers and students who struggle with the day-to-day difficulties of their immigration status. The collection, DREAMing Out Loud: Voices of Undocumented Students includes fifty-nine personal essays, short stories, memoir and poems with an introduction by award-winning Mexican novelist and essayist Álvaro Enrigue, who, along with writers Charlie Vazquez, and Lisa Ko, mentored the students as part of PEN America’s DREAMing Out Loud writing workshop series. Enrigue is the founder of the program with PEN America.
The collection is available at Amazon for $9.95. All proceeds benefit PEN America. More details about the book and PEN America’s “DREAMing Out Loud” workshops HERE.
The collection captures both personal and political views, along with remembrances, of the young writers who came to the United States as children from nearly every continent and from diverse settings: conflict zones and farms to urban centers and rural outposts.
For them, debate over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and other legislative immigration proposals is not an abstract political discussion; rather, it is their lived experience and a constant reminder that at its core, the debate centers on whether their voices—and existence—are welcome in the United States.
So-called “dreamers,” who were brought into the country before they were sixteen years old and without legal immigration authorization, have long faced a variety of financial, legal and cultural obstacles in their pursuit of higher education. The DREAMing Out Loud workshops provide an avenue for Dreamers to build their sense of community on CUNY campuses in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, as they develop their writing and other skills for self-expression.
Susanne Nossel
PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel said: “At PEN America we recognize that freedom of speech depends upon conscious efforts to ensure that the most silenced voices in society are heard. Facing pressures that most Americans can scarcely imagine, these young writers have dared to tell their stories with candor and great insight. We are thrilled to be able to present their writings to the public amid a raging national debate about how we treat newcomers to this country, and whether we stand by the ideals enshrined in our constitution and embodied in our Statue of Liberty. We hope this collection gives readers a sense of the human faces and experiences behind the headlines, forcing us to confront the individual and collective costs of the societal choices we make and tolerate.”
Anne del Castillo, commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME), commented:
“The stories we tell shape our understanding of the world and ourselves as individuals and as a society. We are proud to support the important work of the DREAMing Out Loud program as it empowers DREAMers to tell unfiltered stories about what it means to be young immigrants. The publication of DREAMing Out Loud: Voices of Undocumented Students ensures that the voices of DREAMers will be heard in a field often dominated by political rhetoric—and it recognizes the importance of these stories to our collective understanding of the true American experience.”
MOME supported PEN America’s successful application for a Mayor’s Cultural Impact Grant from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and gave matching funds or the expansion of the program.
The writing reflects the duality of the young authors’ existence and the richness of their cultural backgrounds: they ruminate about their lives, sometimes with longing and sometimes with sadness, as memories and connections fade.
“At first the border between my immediate family in America and the rest of my family in Mexico was mitigated by calls which became fewer and shorter through the years. The border grew wider and thicker until it completely filled the space between us,” writes workshop participant Yesica Balderrama in her essay.
Other writers look critically at American society and its treatment of immigrants. “She’d also watched shows and movies about the U.S. that portrayed America as though it was the place to be so much so that was somehow inevitable that she ended up here. And yet after shoving America’s so-called greatness down everyone’s throat the powers that be castigated people like her for wanting a slice of the American pie,” writes workshop participant Ophelia Kanjo.
In his introduction, Enrigue writes:
“This book gives testimony of one of the most extreme and literary ways of being an American writer in our days. As with Segismundo, the members of the DREAMers Workshop Project have a constant persistent consciousness about the fact that our peaceful everyday life is not given but something we have to fight for, staying strong and alert and outsmarting the system every damned minute of our lives. Resistance is a topic for most of us, for a DREAMer it is breakfast, lunch and dinner.”
PEN America created the DREAMing Out Loud workshops in 2016 to counter the anti-immigrant sentiment on the rise in the United States and to amplify the voices of many living in this country who are marginalized because of their immigration status, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or simply for being perceived as “other.”
A potent and inspiring example of PEN America’s dual mission to celebrate literature and writing as an essential form of free expression, the program is also a means to build a diverse talent pipeline for careers in the literature and publishing industries. The program offers tuition-free writing workshops for the students in New York City. This year, the program was expanded with a Mayor’s Grant for Cultural Impact. The expansion included new City University of New York sites in the Bronx at Lehman College, Flushing at Queens College & Central Brooklyn at Medgar Evers College and strengthened professional development.
PEN America has a long history defending and championing all voices, along with a commitment to the idea that cross-cultural exchange is essential to a free flow of discourse.
Amid a climate of retrenchment in principaled American leadership both around the globe and within our borders, open discourse is a potent catalyst for cross-cultural understanding, cooperation and progress. The PEN World Voices Festival, founded in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001 to broaden avenues of dialogue between the United States and the world, is perhaps the best known public program devoted to this mission. The weeklong annual festival has presented writers and artists from 118 countries speaking 56 languages.
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PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect open expression in the United States and worldwide. It champions the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Its mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible.
Recent in digital publications:
* Four poems , I Am Not a Silent Poet
* Five poems, Spirit of Nature, Opa Anthology of Poetry, 2019
* From the Small Beginning, Entropy Magazine (Enclave, #Final Poems)(July 2019) * Over His Morning Coffee, Front Porch Review (July 2019) Upcoming in digital publications:
* The Damask Garden, In a Woman’s Voice (August 2019)
A busy though bed-bound poet, writer, former columnist and the former associate editor of a regional employment newspaper, my work has been featured widely in print and digital publications including: Levure littéraire, Ramingo’s Porch, Vita Brevis Literature, HerStry, Connotation Press,The Bar None Group, Salamander Cove, I Am Not a Silent Poet, Meta/ Phor(e) /Play, Woven Tale Press, The Compass Rose and California Woman.
I run The Poet by Day, a curated info hub for poets and writers. I founded The Bardo Group/Beguines, a virtual literary community and publisher of The BeZine of which I am the founding and managing editor. Among others, I’ve been featured on The MethoBlog, on the Plumb Tree’s Wednesday Poet’s Corner, and several times as Second Light Live featured poet.
Email me at thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions or commissions.
Thank you for sharing your love of words. Comments will appear after moderation.
Thomas’s £5 writing shed in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire courtesy of wardyboy400 under CC BY 2.0
“He has been called a pagan, a mystic, and a humanistic agnostic; his God has been identified with Nature, Sex, Love, Process, the Life Force, and with Thomas himself.” Dylan Thomas: The Poet and His Critics, R.B. Kershner Jr. as quoted in a Poetry Foundation bio HERE.
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wage
– Dylan Thomas
Excerpt from Death and Entrances (J.M.Dent, 2916)
Dylan Thomas’s writing shed in Laugharne, largely untouched since his death courtesy of Richard Knights under CC BY-SA 2.0 license
Dylan Thomas (1914 – 9 1953) was born in Swansea, Wales. He was a poet and writer whose works include the poems Do not go gentle into that good nightand And death shall have no dominion. He had a reputation for hard living, was popular in his lifetime and even after his early death in Manhattan in 1953.
Thomas left school at sixteen and for awhile worked as a journalist. His work was published while he was in his teens and and in 1934 of Light breaks where no sun shinescaught the attention of the literary world. He met and married (1937) Caitlin Macnamara when he was in London. The settled in the Welsh fishing village of Laugharne and riased three children there.
Recent in digital publications:
* Four poems , I Am Not a Silent Poet
* From the Small Beginning, Entropy Magazine (Enclave, #Final Poems)(July 2019) * Over His Morning Coffee, Front Porch Review (July 2019) Upcoming in digital publications:
* The Damask Garden, In a Woman’s Voice (August 2019)
A busy though bed-bound poet, writer, former columnist and the former associate editor of a regional employment newspaper, my work has been featured widely in print and digital publications including: Levure littéraire, Ramingo’s Porch, Vita Brevis Literature, HerStry, Connotation Press,The Bar None Group, Salamander Cove, I Am Not a Silent Poet, Meta/ Phor(e) /Play, Woven Tale Press, The Compass Rose and California Woman. I run The Poet by Day, a curated info hub for poets and writers. I founded The Bardo Group/Beguines, a virtual literary community and publisher of The BeZine of which I am the founding and managing editor. Among others, I’ve been featured on The MethoBlog, on the Plumb Tree’s Wednesday Poet’s Corner, and several times as Second Light Live featured poet.
Email me at thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, reprint rights, or comissions.
“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.” Lucille Clifton
Thank you for sharing your love of words. Comments will appear after moderation.
Narcissus by Caravaggio depicts Narcissus gazing at his own reflection. / Public Domain Photo Reproduction
“I wonder if the course of narcissism through the ages would have been any different had Narcissus first peered into a cesspool. He probably did.” Frank O’Hara, Early Writing
It happened yesterday] [or maybe it was tomorrow
the days of narcissism rising when
trust was no longer a badge of honor
but an illusionary tool of demigods, those
surveilling who use identity as a weapon and
some simulacrum of joy as a pawn in the
stake-outs of a tech-pop culture that had lost
all rootedness in the old mythologies, replaced
poets and cats, history’s traditional witnesses,
with social networks, cameras, data collection,
even our cell phones became hostages to
the oligarchs and algorithms, and anyone who
was no one became the unknown known, ultimately
for terror – Maybe! – surely for merchandising
the sanctity of toys, six-pack abs, the manipulation
of values, the merging of religions and mammon
for the common unGood, nursing an underbelly of
spiritual poverty and maybe – Maybe! – we did
get the leadership we deserve, given our own
lack of caution – “I have nothing to hide.” – and
our rampant self-aggrandizement on Facebook,
Twitter and – Yes! – our iBlogs
Narcissism has been around since day one, but it is on rise? Is it more entrenched in culture? If so, how and why? Tell us in your poem/s and …
please submit your poem/s by pasting them into the comments section and not by sharing a link
please submit poems only, no photos, illustrations, essays, stories, or other prose
Poems submitted through email or Facebook will not be published.
IF this is your first time joining us for The Poet by Day, Wednesday Writing Prompt, please send a brief bio and photo to me at thepoetbyday@gmail.com to introduce yourself to the community … and to me :-). These are partnered with your poem/s on first publication.
PLEASE send the bio ONLY if you are with us on this for the first time AND only if you have posted a poem (or a link to one of yours) on theme in the comments section below.
Deadline: Monday, July 29 by 8 pm Pacific Daylight Time. If you are unsure when that would be in your time zone, check The Time Zone Converter.
Anyone may take part Wednesday Writing Prompt, no matter the status of your career: novice, emerging or pro. It’s about exercising the poetic muscle, showcasing your work, and getting to know other poets who might be new to you.
You are welcome – encouraged – to share your poems in a language other than English but please accompany it with a translation into English.
Recent in digital publications:
* Four poems , I Am Not a Silent Poet
* Five by Jamie Dedes, Spirit of Nature, Opa Anthology of Poetry, 2019
* From the Small Beginning, Entropy Magazine (Enclave, #Final Poems)(July 2019) * Over His Morning Coffee, Front Porch Review (July 2019) Upcoming in digital publications:
* The Damask Garden, In a Woman’s Voice (August 2019)
A busy though bed-bound poet, writer, former columnist and the former associate editor of a regional employment newspaper, my work has been featured widely in print and digital publications including: Levure littéraire, Ramingo’s Porch, Vita Brevis Literature, HerStry, Connotation Press,The Bar None Group, Salamander Cove, I Am Not a Silent Poet, Meta/ Phor(e) /Play, Woven Tale Press, The Compass Rose and California Woman. I run The Poet by Day, a curated info hub for poets and writers. I founded The Bardo Group/Beguines, a virtual literary community and publisher of The BeZine of which I am the founding and managing editor. Among others, I’ve been featured on The MethoBlog, on the Plumb Tree’s Wednesday Poet’s Corner, and several times as Second Light Live featured poet.
Email me at thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, reprint rights, or comissions.
“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.” Lucille Clifton
Thank you for sharing your love of words. Comments will appear after moderation.
And it being Tuesday, here are the responses to the last Wednesday Writing Prompt, Gone the Winter Gods for Those of Spring, July 17, which asked poets to write about a season or the seasons and so they do. From spring in Bulgaria to spring in India, from a pensive visit to a cafe in Los Angeles during a humid July to feast of seasons in South Yorkshire, from the sun in Côte d’Azur to rain in Dartmoor, from the promise of spring in San Jose (CA) to the seasons as metaphor and memory in Pakistan, the yearly devisions are weighted with sensual pleasures, rituals, reminders, and symbols.
This week’s collection is courtesy of bogpan, mm brazfield, Paul Brookes, Anjum Wasim Dar, Irma Do, Sheila Jacob, Dick Jones, Frank McMahon, Sonja Benskin Mesher, and Pali Raj.
Enjoy! And do join us tomorrow for the next Wednesday Writing Prompt. All are welcome. To those who’ve written to ask how to be published on The Poet by Day, participation in Wednesday Writing Prompt is the best way to introduce yourselves.
green green
ah, you won’t remember the sweet October when amber juice drips from the vines
and where does the little grape picker go on that greenest afternoon
ah, the sea got stormy today
little girl, shrink midst the swollen grapes quickly
because the goats’ hooves sing, ah, a joyful god and his dusty entourage,
and a green coluber in the sea of green
ah, you won’t remember the sweet October when you take a sip of juice
july evening warm humidly noisy
in the city i sit between Spring and Broadway streets
at a mall downtown where i’d like to fantasize Bradbury
could be found drinking coffee
looking to my left there are the kids joshing and cussing
rolling on skateboards zephyrs with iphones
to my right hipsters with credit cards today green means something else
micro chips smart chips designer chips vegan chips
i smile Mona L style and sip my Vietnamese coffee straight up
pigeons coo me out seductively with the waffle sound
of their aged wings dusty with the history of my time
here in this old new modern city
a tiny crack on the wall
by the fire department’s emergency pipe
holds my attention but i knit by brows
dainty lilac flowers
offered up to the most attentive student
the teacher dark green weed shows the little creatures
exquisite tiny intricate jewels luring in the bees
another universe within my urban home
i don’t like hot weather
sweat panting and stickiness
should only be for sex
but if the retiring sun hadn’t drawn me out
for the night i would have missed the buzzing of life
and random thoughts of HST soul madness and did JD really
shoot his ashes out of a canon
crazy kids at times trapped by the freedom of the mind
i’m working on an espresso now looking around
twirling my ankle like a cat’s tail
am i happy today i must be
today i’m not running
as much
My oak skin believes
it is spring, electric rhythm
pushes out long
yellow catkins
and small female flowers,
purple hairstreak
butterfly caterpillar food
A false spring in dendrites
in my wintered head.
My leaf-burst happens
next mid-May
not this end of December.
Watch my hawthorn buds blink,
new fresh green leaves cum creamy white flowers, Queen bumblebees pierce
nectar and pollen from my Spring flowers,
frogspawn wobble in my ponds, ditches.
Bluebells confetti my woodland
hear Chiffchaffs arrival ‘chiff chaff’
tops of my trees and Cuckoos, swallows,
house martins and swifts feathered return.
Small pair of step ladders
roped together
pink bucket
childs yellow chair
stood outside terrace
window await instruction
washing strung out
between red brick
terrace walls
and wooden fence lats
signs of spring
street bottom cold mist
like over grainy movie
photographic fault
greys out background
like floating
detached house
stands to one side
observes
with a disinterested point of view
not like our terrace
where neighbours hear through walls
or in entryway
our oven fan
flaps through boisterous
kids play football,
humpbreathed lovers at night
a gunning motorbike
beneath billows of surf clouds
walk against tide
in dappled sunlight
over tarmac sea floor
pass ash maple fronds
where marine call centre
talks bubbles
FYI: Paul Brookes, a stalwart participant in The Poet by Day Wednesday Writing Prompt, is running an ongoing series on poets, Wombwell Rainbow Interviews. Connect with Paul if you’d like to be considered for an interview. Visit him, enjoy the interviews, get introduced to some poets who may be new to you, and learn a few things.
in cold, grief snow bound encapsulated
crushed fallen swept foliage separated
branches heaving moaning sighing
I , like the brave trunk stiff,contemplated
December’s last days, ending or drifting
to new beginnings, dreary evenings
what is to be celebrated, one is thinking
it is a time of gathering and blessing…
bloodshed blasts, death blows through
North East North West North South North
does not stop- by benumbing weather
death knows not barbed wire or border
why celebrate the coming of Peace when
peace is not belief,when strafe and strife
is here there and everywhere, then, do
do we really love or care for human life “?
Celebrate with joy in white and red
white is a shroud and blood is red
spirits rise, bodies lie, darkened sky
players play with arms’ held high-
I seek Peace and Holy Peace will come!
we pray and decorate honor and wait’
‘O People do not stop to Celebrate’ the
Gift of Life, let the Bells Ring, anticipate
bury the hate for black or white
world is a rainbow ‘ day or night
think stop think no one is winning’
Hark, I feel, Someone Blessed is Coming’
Know now the reason the time, not, is late’
Time to Be Happy Time to Celebrate , Celebrate
“POETRY PEACE and REFORM Go Together -Let Us All Strive for PEACE on EARTH for ALL -Let Us Make a Better World -WRITE To Make PEACE PREVAIL.” Anjum Wasim Dar
Thoughts on January 6
A Quadrille
My summer island beckons me
When the sun hides behind
Winter clouds. Her waves, trapped
In whispering shallows, softly request
My return. Her rocky shoreline
Curved in a waiting embrace.
Her salty scent of carefree
Days warming the frigid air.
Only 6 more months.
To purchase this little gem of a volume, Through My Father’s Eyes (review, interview, and a sampling of poems HERE), contact Sheila directly at she1jac@yahoo.com
SUN AND RAIN
La Croix-Valmer, Côte d’Azur.
By day we burn into our own
shadows. Crash-landed
on white sand, scoured
by salt, we rust and wither,
Once we were flesh,
now we are part terra cotta,
part dead leaves, all oven
dust. That birthright
certainty, cool water
falling, belongs to legend
lodged in rumour. Rising,
rising, the sun yells
in a blue room and
we drown inside
each other’s steam.
By night we slip
between cool covers
and we dream in green.
:::
Fernworthy Reservoir, Dartmoor.
Inside the gold-green heart
of rain we move like figures
in each other’s memory.
Directionless, we’ve lost
the certainty of standing water,
under a moiling sky, splayed
face down across the moor.
Now mighty blades of rain
have chopped the logic
of the hills into broken
language and we can’t read
the meaning of this world
without horizons. Taproot boots
are sucked between tussocks
and we stand, motionless,
mouths open, doomed beneath
our packs, bog men dissolving
back to salt and sinew.
Dick’s collection Ancient Lights is available through Amazon HERE.
AMBIGUOUS SPRING
The colours were returning: pathfinder celandine,
yellow as rich as butter freshly-churned,
pale infantry of hellebore and crocus,
racy flights of blackthorn, early bees.
A pelt of snow has caped the distant hills;
milk-white ice conceals. Now wind shrives skin,
uncorks a furl of rooks to larrick
in the heady draughts while buzzards
rise, their plangent calls ringing through the air
above the trees, at ease in their hunting spirals
or jousting, perhaps, in early season foreplay.
How will they fare tomorrow
when gales will drum and thump
and a waterfall sweeps downwards from the sky?
I will sow seeds, drink tea, wait until the storms
have clawed their way beyond,
judge the wisest moment to emerge,
to steep my hands in earth’s true wealth,
when sun and water have balanced
what the winds have weathered,
to sample,grit under finger nails, palms
dark-stained or smeared blue with clay,
to fondle the webbèd texture,
test, grain by grain, its tilth, sniff aromas
of leaf and loam, praise the work of worm
and microbe, frost and air, declare,
to no one in particular, that the land is ready.
Sonja Benskin Mesher, RCA paintings (This is her Facebook page, so you can connect with her there as well as view photographs of her colorful paintings.)
Blossoms and promise
Spring begins
Hopeful heart, who would now spoil a day
Winter is dead.
Sure, you can snuggle up *with*
a cup of tea and read
*I ain’t a bad guy*
What is it like?
Gone the Winter Gods for Those of Spring, a poem make an escape….yeah
I ain’t this year and I ain’t your fault.
Blossoms and promise
Spring begins ….
Recent in digital publications:
* Four poems , I Am Not a Silent Poet
* Five by Jamie Dedes, Spirit of Nature, Opa Anthology of Poetry, 2019
* From the Small Beginning, Entropy Magazine (Enclave, #Final Poems)(July 2019) * Over His Morning Coffee, Front Porch Review (July 2019) Upcoming in digital publications:
* The Damask Garden, In a Woman’s Voice (August 2019)
A busy though bed-bound poet, writer, former columnist and the former associate editor of a regional employment newspaper, my work has been featured widely in print and digital publications including: Levure littéraire, Ramingo’s Porch, Vita Brevis Literature, HerStry, Connotation Press,The Bar None Group, Salamander Cove, I Am Not a Silent Poet, Meta/ Phor(e) /Play, Woven Tale Press, The Compass Rose and California Woman. I run The Poet by Day, a curated info hub for poets and writers. I founded The Bardo Group/Beguines, a virtual literary community and publisher of The BeZine of which I am the founding and managing editor. Among others, I’ve been featured on The MethoBlog, on the Plumb Tree’s Wednesday Poet’s Corner, and several times as Second Light Live featured poet.
Email me at thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, reprint rights, or comissions.
“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.” Lucille Clifton
Thank you for sharing your love of words. Comments will appear after moderation.
With an Introduction by Mexican novelist Álvaro Enrigue, the Collection is the Product of PEN America’s “DREAMing Out Loud” Workshops for CUNY students
Dylan Thomas (1914 – 9 1953) was born in Swansea, Wales. He was a poet and writer whose works include the poems 
Jamie Dedes' THE POET BY DAY Webzine 