As we release this current issue, our most extensive yet, Poets and Dreamers is honored to share works from so many exquisite artists, poets, and authors who gather to represent voices and cultures from all over the world. By coming together to create enlightenment around this theme, The Dreamers and Displaced, we celebrate love, understanding and unity among all cultures.
Growing up in the 1970s, in the sunny, peached-filled orchard city that was once San Jose, with its broken sidewalks, music playing from open windows, its healing gardens and many cultures laughing together to make up diverse neighborhoods, my parents had moved to California from New York City and settled just outside downtown. My father, who brought from the University of Chicago the spirit of invention and a wisdom about the magic possible in diversity, taught me to question, to trust my intuition....to create. My mother, who believed in equality--not simply for women but for all cultures, classes, and orientations--taught me to look past fear, to reinvent the system, and to connect with all cultures. Weeks after I was born, my mother began her career with social services for Santa Clara County; she spent her life advocating for women without rights, for cultures without voices, and for children who lacked the basic means of survival. She led life-changing organizations, raised consciousness, and she changed the system. She taught us to read every day, to dream, and to delight in the sounds all around us--not to dismiss the voices of the cultures we heard throughout our neighborhood, but to work harder so that we could understand the music in these voices, to evolve with the lessons brought by the many cultures around us, to find strength in that diversity, to view each person as a gift.
When I went to school, I gravitated toward circles that represented and honored all cultures. As I grew older and started my career, I was contacted by professionals from all over the world, each seeking my help with telling their life stories and articulating their worth as they pursued paths of leadership in the global marketplace. Most came to me with "impossible" dreams, and we mapped out strategies for turning those intelligent dreams into realities. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been if my parents hadn't been dreamers, if they hadn't dared to leave New York and pursue their own vision, or if they hadn't made such efforts to teach us about humanity....they were, after all, leaving their own painful stories and shadows of past lives behind. But they did take that risk. They did settle near the Pacific shore, and they did so with literature, art, and equality in mind...they went on to change many lives, and they inspired me to do the same.
The Dreamers and Displaced of today, in California and throughout the world, represent my closest childhood friends, my early love stories, the families that welcomed me into their homes, their hearts, and their lives. The Dreamers of this world are the children of a culture that taught me to cook, to dance, to love life, to sing....most of all, that no matter how little one might have, there is always enough to give of ourselves...
And that is the theme of this current issue. Inside each of us is a dreamer; we wander this earth in search of not just a home but a society guided by humanity, a place where we can actualize our dreams, and for people we can love, belong to, take care of as our own.
Here, in this journal, these people, that spirit, and that space exist...
What began as a breathtaking collection of mesmerizing images from artist Simon Alcantara, then an interview with poet & activist John Guzlowski led to a review of Guzlowski's book, Echoes of Tattered Tongues, then magically evolved into a rich collection of works that represent cultures from all over the world...we come together in love and strength to share new fiction from Eduardo Santiago...new non-fiction from Reyna Grande, Julissa Arce, Kevin McGrath, Marian Haddad, Maritza Mora, and Katharine Kline...sublime poetry from Juan Felipe Herrera, Arlene Biala, Oriana Ivy, Persis Karim, Karen Cordova, John Guzlowski, Aida Salazar, Kristen D Scott, Francisco Bustos, Marian Haddad, Christos Tsialis, Maritza Mora, Fatma Assef, Kalpna Singh-Chitnis, Julio Aguilar, Alexandra Kostoulas, D. Ellis Phelps, Juan Perez, Ricki Mandeville, Kushal Poddar, Wendy Barker and Liliana Romero...and finally, the most exquisite collection of eclectic photographic images from beloved artist and designer Simon Alcantara...
Together, miracles can take place. Through art, magic is possible. As the Poets and the Dreamers of the world, we hold the power to make this happen...
Growing up in the 1970s, in the sunny, peached-filled orchard city that was once San Jose, with its broken sidewalks, music playing from open windows, its healing gardens and many cultures laughing together to make up diverse neighborhoods, my parents had moved to California from New York City and settled just outside downtown. My father, who brought from the University of Chicago the spirit of invention and a wisdom about the magic possible in diversity, taught me to question, to trust my intuition....to create. My mother, who believed in equality--not simply for women but for all cultures, classes, and orientations--taught me to look past fear, to reinvent the system, and to connect with all cultures. Weeks after I was born, my mother began her career with social services for Santa Clara County; she spent her life advocating for women without rights, for cultures without voices, and for children who lacked the basic means of survival. She led life-changing organizations, raised consciousness, and she changed the system. She taught us to read every day, to dream, and to delight in the sounds all around us--not to dismiss the voices of the cultures we heard throughout our neighborhood, but to work harder so that we could understand the music in these voices, to evolve with the lessons brought by the many cultures around us, to find strength in that diversity, to view each person as a gift.
When I went to school, I gravitated toward circles that represented and honored all cultures. As I grew older and started my career, I was contacted by professionals from all over the world, each seeking my help with telling their life stories and articulating their worth as they pursued paths of leadership in the global marketplace. Most came to me with "impossible" dreams, and we mapped out strategies for turning those intelligent dreams into realities. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been if my parents hadn't been dreamers, if they hadn't dared to leave New York and pursue their own vision, or if they hadn't made such efforts to teach us about humanity....they were, after all, leaving their own painful stories and shadows of past lives behind. But they did take that risk. They did settle near the Pacific shore, and they did so with literature, art, and equality in mind...they went on to change many lives, and they inspired me to do the same.
The Dreamers and Displaced of today, in California and throughout the world, represent my closest childhood friends, my early love stories, the families that welcomed me into their homes, their hearts, and their lives. The Dreamers of this world are the children of a culture that taught me to cook, to dance, to love life, to sing....most of all, that no matter how little one might have, there is always enough to give of ourselves...
And that is the theme of this current issue. Inside each of us is a dreamer; we wander this earth in search of not just a home but a society guided by humanity, a place where we can actualize our dreams, and for people we can love, belong to, take care of as our own.
Here, in this journal, these people, that spirit, and that space exist...
What began as a breathtaking collection of mesmerizing images from artist Simon Alcantara, then an interview with poet & activist John Guzlowski led to a review of Guzlowski's book, Echoes of Tattered Tongues, then magically evolved into a rich collection of works that represent cultures from all over the world...we come together in love and strength to share new fiction from Eduardo Santiago...new non-fiction from Reyna Grande, Julissa Arce, Kevin McGrath, Marian Haddad, Maritza Mora, and Katharine Kline...sublime poetry from Juan Felipe Herrera, Arlene Biala, Oriana Ivy, Persis Karim, Karen Cordova, John Guzlowski, Aida Salazar, Kristen D Scott, Francisco Bustos, Marian Haddad, Christos Tsialis, Maritza Mora, Fatma Assef, Kalpna Singh-Chitnis, Julio Aguilar, Alexandra Kostoulas, D. Ellis Phelps, Juan Perez, Ricki Mandeville, Kushal Poddar, Wendy Barker and Liliana Romero...and finally, the most exquisite collection of eclectic photographic images from beloved artist and designer Simon Alcantara...
Together, miracles can take place. Through art, magic is possible. As the Poets and the Dreamers of the world, we hold the power to make this happen...
(While we have gathered works from as many cultures as we could, we still want to welcome yours...If you have works and would like to include your voice, please insert your kind, loving words in the comments sections below the works...take part in this effort to create love and unity through art..Join the voices of the Poets and the Dreamers of the world....)
So we travel on earth seeking the terrain of Poetry, walking through wilderness and empty landscape or visiting those ancient sites like Dholavira in far-western Gujarat, or Mykenai in the Greek Peloponnese, or the Arawak campsite on eastern Carriacou in the Grenadine Windward Isles, pursuing that authenticity of experience in a form of antique material reality...
These are places, strange and vague situations where death is manifold and thoroughly extant to the careful eye. There are women’s bangles made of shell to be picked up from the saline dust or small copper beads and thin chert blades, or tiny obsidian arrow-heads that can be unhidden and disclosed beneath those bloody grey walls about the Lion Gate, or beautiful indented potsherds and ceramic fragments at the waterline where the Atlantic rolls out its long blue visceral waves...
The latest issue of Poets and Dreamers Literary Journal includes works of literary fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and visual arts from an eclectic selection of established and aspiring artists and writers.
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