I Offer My Heart as a Target - Book Release Wednesday, December 4 at Women & Children First

Review in Publishers Weekly of I Offer My Heart as a Target / Ofrezco mi corazón como una diana

I Offer My Heart as a Target / Ofrezco mi corazón como una diana

Review in Publishers Weekly 10/21 issue:

In the introduction to this piercing and timely exploration of gender, violence, and social justice, novelist, poet, and critic Rigoberto González writes: “The survivor speaks her truth, or rather, writes her way to truth as an avenue of expression.” As the book unfolds, readers witness the role of language in creating truth from a variety of aesthetic vantages, ranging from the philosophical to the image-driven: “To smoke in another language causes a cancer that spreads; first the lips, then the tongue,” Paz explains in “Diaspora of Words.” Throughout, she calls attention to language as a reason for those in power to exclude, and effectively disenfranchise, those individuals beneath them. Yet language also appears as a source of understanding, connection, and community: “We went to live to indulge the enemy/ to resist nights of storms and orphanhood to hear the silence of the lips/ sealed by the ignorance of the language.” To understand others, individuals must first learn how they organize, structure, and understand the world around them through language, Paz suggests. “Against all prognoses,/ we survive,” she proclaims in this moving book that, with Schimel’s skillful translation, highlights resilience in the face of oppression.

PRONTO: Ellas Cuentan

Ellas cuentan 

Antología de Crime Fiction por latinoamericanas en EEUU

Edición Gizella Meneses y Melanie Márquez – Adams

Sudaquia Editores. New York, NY

Cuentos de:

   #KiannyNAntigua #OrietteD’Angelo #Anjanette Delgado#MargaritaDrago #TeresaDovalpage #AzucenaHernández
   #DainerysMachadoVento #MelanieMárquezAdams #Gizella Meneses#JuanaMRamos #JenniferThorndike
   #JohannyVázquezPaz #CristinaZabalaga

I Offer My Heart as a Target / Ofrezco mi corazón como una diana Coming in 2019

I Offer My Heart as a Target / Ofrezco mi corazón como una diana

By: Johanny Vázquez Paz

Introducing the new winner of the Paz Prize for Poetry, given by the National Poetry Series, featuring an introduction by Rigoberto González, and presented in both Spanish and English.

Forthcoming: 12/3/19

From the introduction by Rigoberto González:

A regular heartbeat is composed of the two sounds made when the blood flows through the organ as the valves contract. To listen to its rhythm through a stethoscope is to appreciate the slight distinction between two movements that are unequivocally connected—one beat calls, the other responds. Similarly, the two sections of Johanny Vázquez Paz’s stunning book of poems offer the reader distinct tones powered by the same source: perseverance.

In the first part, the speaker declares herself a survivor. Her story is rooted to a violent landscape that some may call home, though for this woman home is a battleground, her body ravaged by war ...

The second part examines a much different challenge that presents itself to many immigrants: displacement. The speaker’s struggle to hold on to her past, indeed her history, via her native Spanish language is compromised by the pressures of assimilation . . .

Ofrezco mi corazón como una diana is a book of victory over silence and the truest testament to what it means to outlive that which has defeated or deflated many. If there’s a spirit guiding the courage embedded in its pages, it must be the Phoenix, the miraculous being that rises from the ashes reborn, or rather, pieced together again. The heart beats once more. The woman reclaims the word.

The Paz Prize for Poetry is presented by the National Poetry Series and The Center for Writing and Literature at Miami Dade College and is awarded biennially. Named in the spirit of the late Nobel Prize–winning poet Octavio Paz, it honors a previously unpublished book of poetry written originally in Spanish by an American resident.