9 Afro-Latinx Writers Reshaping the Poetry Landscape

More than a writer, Danyelis Rodriguez del Orbe considers herself “a spoken word artist.” A lover of performing arts, this Dominicana thrives on stage and has found that spoken poetry has offered her the autonomy she needed to tell her story as an undocumented Black woman growing up in the Bronx.

She describes her style as a freestyle compilation of feelings and truth. “Writing poems like a “Poem of Reclamation for Papi” and “Resistance for Mami”, I was able to have complex conversations with my family about how we see ourselves in the United States versus in our home country, Dominican Republic,” she tells POPSUGAR. “And how we may have been misinformed about how best to relate to other Black people in the diaspora.”

For her, poetry is a tool that allows people to tell their own stories, embrace their cultural identity, and shape the way they see ourselves and how they want others to see them.

In her forthcoming young adult memoir, “Islands Apart: Becoming Dominican American,”Jasminne Mendez writes about the moment she knew she wanted to become a poet. She was about ten years old when her father took her and her siblings to hear Maya Angelou speak and read poetry at Austin Peay State University. “I did realise in that moment that poetry had the power to move people, and I knew I wanted to do that, I knew I wanted keep writing and would always write,” she tells POPSUGAR.

The daughter of Dominican immigrants, she grew up learning both languages and has written extensively about this duality and what being Dominican American means. Although, she also writes children’s books, young adult novels, essays, and creative non-fiction, she says poetry has allowed her to make sense of the ways she often felt “not enough” or “not from here or there.” “It’s allowed me to create a culture almost all my own, based off my intersectional identities and lived experiences. It’s shown me that my cultural identity is ever evolving and doesn’t have to fit into one box or another and that it doesn’t have to be like anyone else’s.”

This Afro-Boricua wrote her first poem when she was in the third grade and has been imagining, creating, and connecting with others through this tool ever since. Raina León’s womanist and Afro-centric poems, but also fiction and academic work, have been published in over 100 journals and anthologies. She’s also a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly publication devoted to the promotion of Latinx arts, and a professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California. León is the first Afro-Latina to hold that title there. To her, Poetry and any creative practice is rooted in community and is everywhere. So, in her opinion, its growing presence and popularity in social media is only natural. “Poetry is breath. It is always as central as that, and social media is just the vehicle right now,” she tells POPSUGAR. “Before it was the speakeasy, the party after the jazz show, the salon, the public theatre.”

Vanessa Chica Ferreira is a New York City educator, writer, poet, play-wright, and self-proclaimed fat activist, who started writing journals when she was a kid after being inspired by Anne Frank’s diary. She is also the curator and editor of “What They Leave Behind, a Latinx Anthology,” a powerful collection with the work of over 50 Latinx poets, whose poems embody and celebrate the Latinx diaspora and all its complexity.

“I believe the purpose of my poetry is to create, to connect, to release, to contemplate, to be petty, to remember, to heal, to tell, to inform, for activism, to honour my mother’s memory,” she tells POPSUGAR. “It is a shapeshifter that changes with my needs.”

She feels anyone can sense the influence of her cultural identity in her poetry from her Spanglish to her references of Merengue, memories of patios and aguacates, or the sacrifices her mother made to leave Santo Domingo and get them to the United States.

For those who’ve never read poetry or think poetry is not for them, she recommends to start by reading poetry from people who look and sound like you. “Find the poetry that speaks to you,” she adds.

Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s poetry explores and plays with dualities like the relationship between identity and language. To paint that duality, she often mixes Spanish and English and different voices that are natural to her, with lines like “Oye: /this talk / ain’t school-taught.”

The poet and professor of literature and creative writing says her style has been influenced by poets like Mayra Santos-Febres, a celebrated Afro-Puerto Rican multi-genre author like her.

“My cultural identity is very important to me,” she tells POPSUGAR. “I often write about being both Black American and Puerto Rican and living in in-between spaces and different worlds, and where those worlds overlap. I’m proud of my heritage and like to explore it in my poetry.”