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By María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado, M.F.A., M.A.
In Celebration of Black & African American Poets | Feb 2024
February 1, 2024
No Puerto Rican poets existed for me from PreK through 12 in Springfield (MA) public schools throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s. At home, my hard-working Puerto Rican parents with a few years of U.S. colonized elementary public schooling in Puerto Rico in the 1940s had children to raise & bills to pay, entrusting my education to teachers who praised my voracious hunger for words in English to render myself visible. At the cost of my Puerto Rican Spanish.
(Foot stomp) You’re in America now. Speak English!
Black poets, African American poets contributed to the forging of my identity as a child and teen and adult poet. And they still do.
While I celebrate Black or African American poets every day, February 2024 with its leap year day, enables me to highlight my respect for poets, whose poems have directly informed my identities as a multilingual Boricua woman poet of color.
- María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado, MFA, MA
Clark Fellow & PhD student
Comparative Literature, Binghamton University
https://multicreativewisdom.net
In Celebration of Black & African American Poets | Feb 2024
By María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado, M.F.A., M.A.
February 1, 2024
No Puerto Rican poets existed for me from PreK through 12 in Springfield (MA) public schools throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s. At home, my hard-working Puerto Rican parents with a few years of U.S. colonized elementary public schooling in Puerto Rico in the 1940s had children to raise & bills to pay, entrusting my education to teachers who praised my voracious hunger for words in English to render myself visible. At the cost of my Puerto Rican Spanish.
(Foot stomp) You’re in America now. Speak English!
Black poets, African American poets contributed to the forging of my identity as a child and teen and adult poet. And they still do.
While I celebrate Black or African American poets every day, February 2024 with its leap year day, enables me to highlight my respect for poets, whose poems have directly informed my identities as a multilingual Boricua woman poet of color.
- María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado, MFA, MA
Clark Fellow & PhD student
Comparative Literature, Binghamton University
https://multicreativewisdom.net
