Melinda Palacio is an award-winning poet and author from South-Central Los Angeles. She studied Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley and earned a graduate degree in the same field at UC Santa Cruz. Palacio is a 2007 PEN USA Emerging Voices Rosenthal Fellow and participated in the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. In 2009, she won Kulupi Press’s Sense of Place 2009 competition for her poetry chapbook, Folsom Lockdown. Her poetry and fiction have been widely published and anthologized, including Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature (Bilingual Press), Southern Poetry Anthology IV: Louisiana (Texas Review Press), and the literary journal PALABRA, to name a few.
This
year saw the publication of her first novel, Ocotillo Dreams (Bilingual Press), which has received critical
acclaim and is the winner of several awards including the PEN Oakland Josephine
Miles Award (which will be awarded this December in a ceremony), and the Mariposa
Award for Best First Book.
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| Melinda Palacio |
And
this week will see the official release of Palacio’s first full-length poetry
collection, How
Fire is a Story, Waiting, published by Luis J. Rodriguez’s Tía Chucha Press.
From the
publisher: “Melinda
Palacio’s newest poetry collection creates images that are at once
heartbreaking and humorous. She tackles
elemental subjects of family and childhood with the same depth and grace as
that of myth making and death. As the
only child of a mother who died too young, she infuses her words with longing
and life, and celebrates the women who came before her. Each poem offers up the truth in a fearless
and unsentimental voice. Palacio’s
lyrical language punches an unexpected pause to subjects such as domestic
violence and her childhood in South Central Los Angeles. How Fire
Is A Story, Waiting is divided into four sections: Fire, Air, Water, and
Earth. In each section Palacio tempers
heartbreak, violence, and disappointment with the antidote of humor, beauty,
and an appreciation for life.”
Praise for How Fire is a Story, Waiting:
“Palacio’s
work is expansive, physical, funeral-wet, elevated, funny, existential,
woman-story, jazzy and Pachukona. She is
unafraid to dive head-on into questions of death, loss and self. Into the fiery
entwined spikes of father-daughter estrangements, mother-daughter intimacies
and most of all, she is ‘insomniac’ bold in this volume as an ongoing sequence
on self. Melinda's collection has Bop
and ‘swagger,’ lingo, song, denuncia, compassion and wild, unexpected turns—all
the key ingredients and hard-won practices of a poet (and shaman) in command of
her powers. I don't think there is
anything like this book. ¡Brillantissima!”
—Juan Felipe Herrera
“’Continue
to fix broken things,’ Melinda Palacio writes in ‘Ramona Street,’ and the poems
in How Fire Is a Story, Waiting are
consumed with naming the problems of the world and trying—however provisionally—to
set them right. Palacio's verse, dense
with imagery, is by turns sorrowful and sardonic, and always the voice is her
own. There's a little universe in this
book: enter and learn.” —David Starkey, Santa Barbara Poet Laureate Emeritus
Thank you, Daniel.
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