From the Stacks is a regular series on the Poetry Center Blog in which we solicit authors to wander our library and choose books that have been important to them and/or that they recommend.
Lehua M. Taitano is a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigo, Guåhan (Guam) and co-founder of Art 25. She is the author of two volumes of poetry—Inside Me an Island (WordTech Editions) and A Bell Made of Stones (TinFish Press). Her chapbook, appalachiapacific, won the 2010 Merriam-Frontier Award for short fiction. She has two recent chapbooks of poetry and visual art: Sonoma(Dropleaf Press) and Capacity (a Hawai’i Review e-chap). Her poetry, essays, and Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction have appeared in Fence, Kartika Review, Red Ink International Journal, Poetry Magazine, and numerous others. She has served as an APAture Featured Literary Artist via Kearny Street Workshop, a Kuwentuhan poet via The Poetry Center at SFSU, and as a Culture Lab visual artist and digital exhibit advisor for the Smithsonian Institute’s Asian Pacific American Center. Taitano’s work investigates modern indigeneity, decolonization, and cultural identity in the context of diaspora.
Bojan Louis (Diné) is the author of the poetry collection Currents (BkMk Press 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award, and the nonfiction chapbook Troubleshooting Silence in Arizona (The Guillotine Series 2012). His fiction has appeared in Ecotone, Numéro Cinq Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review; nonfiction in MudCity Journal and AS/US. Former poetry editor at RED INK and former poetry editor and co-founder of Waxwing, Louis has been a resident at The MacDowell Colony and is the inaugural Virginia G. Piper Fellow-in-Residence at Arizona State University. He will be joining the MFA and AIS faculty at the University of Arizona in the fall 2019.
Lehua's selections From the Stacks are:
Invocation to Daughters by Barbara Jane Reyes
when it rains/mat hekid o ju by Ofelia Zepeda
The Cormorant Hunter's Wife by Joan Kane
Roughly for the North by Carrie Ayagaduk Ojanen
Tributaries by Laura Da'
The Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye
Deepstep Come Shining by C.D. Wright
Continental Drift by Arlene Biala
A Transpacific Poetics edited by Lisa Samuels and Sequoia Nakayasu
New Poetics of Native Nations edited by Heid E. Erdrich
Puna Wai Kōrero: An Anthology of Maori Poetry in English edited by Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan
Bojan's selections From the Stacks are:
Factory of Tears by Valzhyna Mort
Collected Poems by Lynda Hull
The Last Nostalgia by Joe Bolton
Flood Song by Sherwin Bitsui
Leaving Tulsa by Jennifer Foerster
The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde
Poems by Adrienne Rich
In Mad Love and War by Joy Harjo
Never Be the Horse by Beckian Fritz Goldberg
New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña by Cecilia Vicuña