 Adela Najarro’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals and can be found in the University of Arizona Press anthology The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. As part of the Cabrillo College English Department she co-coordinates the Puente Project, a program designed to support Latinidad in all its aspects, while preparing community college students to transfer to four year colleges and universities. Her extended family’s emigration from Nicaragua to San Francisco began in the 1940’s and concluded in the eighties when the last of the family settled in the Los Angeles area. She holds a doctorate in literature and creative writing from Western Michigan University, as well as an M.F.A. from Vermont College. She now calls Santa Cruz home.  What People Are Saying:
"For its eye of the all-seeing crocodile half in dark waters and half in the prey-light of death and hunger, for its electric rush of love, its gambles with destiny, for its deep knowledge of borderlessness, the slippage of love and dissolution into something like Mystery makes this collection a rare magic. And perhaps, because of its woman eye, illusory skin, bleached colors and its various upside-down taboos where words and love-deeds are “hechas para atrás / pushed aside,” I commend this book. It is a surreal mathematics, a travelogue to ancestors, a gypsy’s deck of last-breath, plotting flowers ditching toward the sun. A tour de force, magnificent, lovely, sculpted, drenched with Borges, Sexton, Najarro. A radically new Latina verse." Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of California "Between Nicaragua and the United States lives the Country of Spirit. This is where poet Adela Najarro breathes a world fresh and merciful with words that spring from the heart of our troubled lands, our families and our desire to love. I applaud her vital, luminescent and transcendent understanding that Mystery can be shared and understood, poem by poem. Embrace her work, for it is our future." Denise Chávez, Author of The King and Queen of Comezón |