Episode #11: "Poetry Has Inspired Revolutions"
On this episode, we're excited to bring you Erika L. Sánchez and Diane Seuss
Erika L. Sánchez is a #1 New York Times bestselling author for her young adult novel I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, which was also a National Book Awards finalist, and Tomás Rivera Award winner. Time has recognized it as one of the best YA novels of all time, and yet it’s still been banned around the country for its so-called “controversial” themes. It is now is being made into an MGM Orion film directed by America Ferrera. Erika is an executive producer on the project. Most recently, her critically acclaimed memoir-in-essays, Crying in the Bathroom, won the Chicago Review of Books Nonfiction award and has been optioned for television. Her debut poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, was a finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award. Sánchez was a Fulbright Scholar, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent fellow from the Poetry Foundation, a Princeton Arts Fellow, a recipient of the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, and a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry.
Diane Seuss is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who has authored six books of poetry: Modern Poetry a finalist for the National Book Award and short-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize; frank: sonnets, winner of the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry; Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, a recipient of the Juniper Prize for Poetry; and It Blows You Hollow. She was a Guggenheim Fellow, she received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2024, Seuss was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Read Along!
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A “stunning” (America Ferrera) YA novel about a teenager coming to terms with losing her sister and finding herself amid the pressures, expectations, and stereotypes of growing up in a Mexican American home—from the author of Crying in the Bathroom
“Alive and crackling—a gritty tale wrapped in a page-turner. ”—The New York Times
Perfect Mexican daughters do not go away to college. And they do not move out of their parents’ house after high school graduation. Perfect Mexican daughters never abandon their family.
But Julia is not your perfect Mexican daughter. That was Olga’s role.
Then a tragic accident on the busiest street in Chicago leaves Olga dead and Julia left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of her family. And no one seems to acknowledge that Julia is broken, too. Instead, her mother seems to channel her grief into pointing out every possible way Julia has failed.
But it’s not long before Julia discovers that Olga might not have been as perfect as everyone thought. With the help of her best friend Lorena, and her first love, first everything boyfriend Connor, Julia is determined to find out. Was Olga really what she seemed? Or was there more to her sister’s story? And either way, how can Julia even attempt to live up to a seemingly impossible ideal?
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FINALIST FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY
FINALIST FOR THE 2025 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE
WINNER OF THE 2024 HEARTLAND BOOKSELLERS AWARD FOR POETRY
Diane Seuss’s signature voice―audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude―has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft―ballad, fugue, aria, refrain, coda―and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those too often underrepresented. Seuss provides a moving account of her picaresque years and their uncertainties, and in the process, she enters the realm between Modernism and Romanticism, between romance and objectivity, with Keats as ghost, lover, and interlocutor.
In poems of rangy curiosity, sharp humor, and illuminating self-scrutiny, Modern Poetry investigates our time’s deep isolation and divisiveness and asks: What can poetry be now? Do poems still have the capacity to mean? “It seems wrong / to curl now within the confines / of a poem,” Seuss writes. “You can’t hide / from what you made / inside what you made.” What she finds there, finally, is a surprising but unmistakable love.
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