Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora
A lush tapestry of poetry and prose, Here to Stay is an invitation to engage with a new field of contemporary American poetry.
"I cannot separate my work from my undocumented identity." --Aline Mello
From the indomitable writers and activists Janine Joseph, Esther Lin, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo comes an anthology gathering some of the best work from currently and formerly undocumented poets, as well as poets from mixed status families from across the undocumented diaspora in America. Here to Stay is a collection of honest, searing, and evocative poems interspersed with short personal narratives. Deeply intimate, these works explore how to exist in the space between the familiar and the unknown, between the safety of silence and the desire to share. Highlighting the significant insights of undocumented poets, this brilliant compendium challenges misconceptions of what it means to live and write as an undocumented person in modern America.
Beautiful, poignant, and timely, this must-read collection is a rich and essential new chapter in the ongoing story of the eclectic immigrant experience and the United States itself.
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Born in the Philippines, Janine Joseph is a formerly undocumented poet, librettist, and the author of Decade of the Brain: Poems and the prize-winning Driving Without a License. Her poetry, essays, and critical writings have appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Atlantic, Poetry Northwest, Orion, Poets & Writers, and the Smithsonian's "What It Means to Be American" project, and she has created works commissioned for the Houston Grand Opera, Washington Master Chorale, and Symphony New Hampshire. A recipient of Fellowships from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, and the Paul and Daisy Soros Foundation, Joseph is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Virginia Tech. She lives in Blacksburg, VA.
Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived as an undocumented immigrant in the United States for 21 years. She won the 2023 Alice James Award for her forthcoming debut book Cold Thief Place. Lin has been an artist-in-residence at Cité internationale, Paris; a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown; and a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in Hyperallergic, New England Review, Sewanee Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Currently she is a critic-at-large for Poetry Northwest. She lives in Seattle.
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Cenzontle, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. prize (BOA editions 2018), winner of the 2019 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in poetry, a finalist for the Norther California Book Award and named a best book of 2018 by NPR and the New York Public Library. As one of the founders of the Undocupoets campaign, he is a recipient of the Barnes and Noble "Writers for Writers" Award. He holds a B.A. from Sacramento State University and was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. His work has appeared or is featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, People Magazine, and PBS Newshour, among others. He lives in Marysville, California where he teaches poetry to incarcerated youth and also teaches at the Ashland University Low-Res MFA program.
A San Francisco Chronicle "Poetic Perspectives from 'Undocumented Diaspora' & New Book for a Season of Change" --
"A full-throated tapestry of real Americana, Here to Stay gets in your face, in your head, and deep into your heart." -- Jose Antonio Vargas, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen
"The poems in this anthology howl, perspire, fall in love, reimagine myth, lose language, find language, have faith in poetry, disbelieve in poetry, repurpose the brutal language of ICE spreadsheets, turn to consider the border, turn away and consider everything but the border--and in this way, page by page, the poems in this anthology are among the best ever written. They will shake you to your core." -- Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of the Pulitzer-Prize finalist The Man Who Could Move Clouds
"In Here to Stay, fifty-three writers invite their fortunate readers into poetry's 'space of freedom'--a territory that affords refuge, revelation, and yes, revolt, in lives too often circumscribed by the cruel boundaries of citizenship 'status'. I'd gladly devote a full week to meditating on each poet's finely wrought verse and stirring artist statement to make a year's worth of communion with the remarkable diasporic community here assembled. I hope you'll join me in this practice." -- Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast
"The undocumented migrant is one of modernity's greatest heroes and, legally speaking, cruelest jokes. This breathtaking collection of poetry across the migrant diaspora does what politics cannot: speak honestly about the paradox of being hated yet invisible. It's the soul food I needed." -- Aarti Shahani, bestselling author Here We Are and award-winning journalist, formerly undocumented
"A collection at once both carefully and playfully curated, Here to Stay resists easy labels in favor of shining the spotlight on writers in some way affected by the U.S. immigration systems' politics of exclusion. By turns joyful, furious, contemplative, funny, and revolutionary, the featured poets in this anthology invite further reading in the world of undocupoetics." -- Alejandra Oliva, author of Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith and Migration
"By presenting such multitudes to its readers, "Here to Stay" makes for a perfect collection for readers to dip in and out of and deepen their understanding of this complex issue." -- San Francisco Chronicle
