Backbone Press finalist!

I'm very happy to learn that my chapbook, The Ocean Between Us, is a finalist in Backbone Press's Spring open reading session.

Backbone Press is a small press for ethnic poets and is interested in:

language that is elegant and provocative; poetry that informs and engages us in broader cultural conversations.

Even if my chapbook doesn't get accepted for publication, it is an honor to make it to the final round!

The Ocean Between Us is a 25-poem chapbook divided into two sections: Puerto Rico poems and Florida poems.  The journey begins with a brief visit back to Puerto Rico that brings back many memories of my childhood spent there. I’m the daughter of an immigrant and an islander whose ancestors also immigrated to their respective homelands.  Within every generation of my family there came a decision: to leave or to stay, and my ancestors always chose to leave, for their own sake and for their children’s.  From this restless heritage I derived a curious lack of home sense—I’ve always been neither one thing nor another, neither native nor alien.  These poems are an attempt to gather all these emotions together into a cohesive whole—to define what we mean by “home” and to highlight that perhaps it’s the ocean between that really matters:  that ever-changing, ever-the-same body that divides us and yet also unites us into a single body.