The Latina
Book Club continues its celebration of Women’s History Month.
Hence, we are
pleased to welcome as our guest blogger Erika M. Martínez,
editor of an
exciting and courageous new literary anthology by 25 Dominican women.
The book will be released on April 15. Watch
for it!
Announcing the
call for submissions for Daring to
Write: Contemporary Narratives by Dominican Women in environments full
of machismo was quite the challenge. When I attended literary events in the
Dominican Republic men offered to contribute to the anthology, yet their writing
often objectified women, depicting them as helpless victims or as possessing
only sexual power. “This is going to be an important work. It should include
men,” someone said to me once. Men assumed they could speak for women, but it
wasn’t enough to have female characters in a story. I had to defend my decision
to concentrate my work on women writers.
At the 2009
International Book Fair in Santo Domingo, I gave a presentation to young
students and pointed out that the reasons for my work were everywhere. Women in
the country earn less than their male counterparts and face double the
unemployment rates. In an hour-long presentation, I couldn’t go into all of the
reasons for the inequities or share the anecdotes I’d heard from the many women
writers who struggled to carve out space and time for writing with the
multiples roles they play in the household. Instead, I had the young audience
look at the photographs covering the walls from floor to ceiling; we were in
the pavilion for Dominican authors. It didn’t take the students long to realize
they were mostly surrounded by portraits of men. I explained that there were many
more Dominican women writing then those who were featured in the pavilion. I
didn’t know what the criteria had been for the selection of portraits, but it
couldn’t have been publication because I knew of several female writers with
published books whose photographs were not displayed.
I also told
the students about one of the classes I was auditing at the university, “Autores
Dominicanos,” that the male professor teaching assigned forty-eight authors and
only four of them were women. This was not because there was a lack of women
authors. The list could have been divided in half between male and female.
I chose to
focus on women because after my parents’ divorce, I was raised by my mother and
other strong single women in my family who struggled to make ends meet working
in factories. Throughout my life I’d longed to see in books the stories I’d
heard as I cooked, sewed and cleaned alongside my mother, cousins and friends
without a male presence. A counter-narrative to the ways in which women are
portrayed in men’s writings was what I needed. I was interested in exploring
what it means to be a Dominican woman in the United States as well as on the
island.
The
anthologies of Latino writers I’d read on my own focused on authors of
Mexican-American, Cuban-American and Puerto Rican-American descent, yet the
Dominican-American population was growing exponentially, becoming the fourth
largest Latino community in the United States. I could not have been the only
one wanting to see our lives reflected in literature.
Common
threads appeared throughout the short stories and personal essays submitted.
The contributors of Daring to Write
delved into how machismo, men’s infidelities and domestic violence shaped the
perceptions and development of young women. We can now hear from the voices of
those who are being objectified speaking as full subjects of their own lives.
Together, the writers in this anthology are reshaping the image of Dominican
women and making them visible.#
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR: Erika M. Martínez works with the
National Writing Project in New Hampshire and is a staff member of their
Invitational Summer Writing Institute. She has contributed to various
anthologies, including Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education and Homelands: Women’s
Journeys across Race, Place, and Time. She lives in Oakland,
California. To learn more about Erika
and DARING TO WRITE, click here.
BOOK SUMMARY:
![]() |
University of Georgia Press |
Daring
to Write: Contemporary Narratives
by Dominican Women
Edited by Erika M. Martínez
Foreword by Julia
Alvarez
With this new Latino
literary collection Erika M. Martínez has brought together twenty-five engaging
narratives written by Dominican women and women of Dominican descent living in
the United States. The first volume of its kind, DARING TO WRITE offers readers a wide array of works on a range
of topics, including love and family, identity and belonging, immigration and
the meaning of home. The resonant voices in this compilation reveal experiences
that have been largely invisible until now.
The volume opens with a
foreword by Julia Alvarez and includes short stories, novel excerpts, memoirs,
and personal essays and features work by established writers such as Angie Cruz
and Nelly Rosario, alongside works by emerging writers. Narratives originally
written in Spanish appear in English for the first time, translated by Achy
Obejas. An important contribution to Latino/a studies, these writings will
introduce readers to a new collection of rich literature.
Contributors: Marivell Contreras, Kersy Corporan, Angie Cruz, Rhina P.
Espaillat, Delta Eusebio, Noris Eusebio-Pol, Yalitza Ferreras, Carolina
González, Farah Hallal, Ángela Hernández, Juleyka Lantigua-Williams,
Ana-Maurine Lara, Erika M. Martínez, Miriam Mejía, Riamny Méndez, Jeannette
Miller, Sheilly Núñez, Jina Ortiz, Sofia Quintero, Dulce María Reyes Bonilla,
Lissette Rojas, Nelly Rosario, Ludin Santana, Leonor Suarez, and Sherezada
(Chiqui) Vicioso.
READ LATINO. CELEBRATE WOMEN.