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| The Feminist Press at CUNY |
This debut is so much more than an immigrant’s story. It is
an ode to the resilience of the human spirit. A hymn to the power of poems and
stories as agents of personal liberation and social change. In any language.
Any culture. Anywhere in the world. ¡Brava, Claudia! ¡Otra, otra! Encore! —Lucha Corpi
Breathtaking.
Honest. Bilingual. Bicultural.
A journey
across numerous borders in search of the Promise Land. Claudia uses all types of forms of writing to
tell her story—poetry, prose, English, Spanish.
This is her life, her memories. Some good, a lot bad. She doesn’t fit in the new land, and after a
few years, she doesn’t fit back home in Guatemala either. She is of both lands,
but none. Does that make her more... or
less? Unfortunately, that is the eternal struggle
of bicultural children.
SUMMARY:
A young Guatemalan immigrant’s
adolescence is shaped by her journey to the US as she grapples with Chapina
tradition and American culture. Claudia D. Hernández weaves together narrative
essay and bilingual poetry in her Louise Meriwether First Book Prize winning
debut KNITTING THE FOG!
Seven-year-old Claudia wakes up one
day to find her mother gone, having left for the United States to flee domestic
abuse and pursue economic prosperity. Claudia and her two older sisters are
taken in by their great aunt and their grandmother, their father no longer in
the picture. Three years later, her mother returns for her daughters, and the
family begins the month-long journey to El Norte. But in Los Angeles, Claudia
has trouble assimilating: she doesn’t speak English, and her Spanish sticks out
as “weird” in their primarily Mexican neighborhood. When her family returns to
Guatemala years later, she is startled to find she no longer belongs there
either. A harrowing story told with the
candid innocence of childhood, Hernández’s memoir depicts a complex
self-portrait of the struggle and resilience inherent to immigration today.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Claudia
D. Hernández is a poet, editor, translator, and bilingual educator, born and
raised in Guatemala. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch
University Los Angeles, and writes in Spanish and English, and sometimes weaves
in Poqomchiʼ, an indigenous language of her Mayan heritage. Hernández is
the editor of the anthology Women,
Mujeres, Ixoq: Revolutionary Visions (Conocimientos Press 2017), and the founder of the
ongoing photography project Today’s Revolutionary Women of Color. She
currently resides in Los Angeles. Visit Claudia at https://www.claudiadhernandez.com.
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