HUMANITY, Volume 1
An Anthology edited by Eileen R. Tabios
Published by Paloma Press
ISBN: 978-1732302518
Release Date: August 15, 2018
Pages: 212
Price: $18
Available now through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Chapters/Indigo, & select bookshops
PALOMA PRESS RELEASES 11TH BOOK, HUMANITY, A FUNDRAISER FOR MIGRANT AND REFUGEE CHILDREN
San Francisco, 15 August 2018 — Paloma Press is pleased to announce the release of its 11th book, HUMANITY, a fundraising anthology in support of UNICEF USA’s emergency relief campaigns on the borders of the United States and in Syria.
Established in 2016, PALOMA PRESS is a San Francisco Bay Area-based independent literary press publishing poetry, prose, and limited edition books. PALOMA believes in the power of the literary arts, how it can create empathy, bridge divides, change the world. To this end, PALOMA has released fundraising chapbooks such as Marawi, in support of relief efforts in the Southern Philippines; and After Irma After Harvey, in support of hurricane-displaced animals in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico. HUMANITY is PALOMA’s 11th book and 3rd fundraiser.
In HUMANITY, one is presented with humanity’s explorations, often struggles, with itself in a variety of contexts. From the anthology’s contributors—poets, environmental advocates, an ethnomusicologist, a physician, an ethnoecologist, a music minister, a clergywoman, a fictionist, and multiculturalists—one glimpses an overall picture of strength and fragility, of empathy, and myriad hopes. #humanitytheanthology #humanity
“The writings in Humanity are global in scope; but rather than explicating or attempting to impose a global system or authoritarian state upon the reader, these works run on thoughtful exploration of human feeling, experience, and action. Here you will find encounters between profoundly different cultures, the authors working their way through threads of humanity or animality and mythology like fibers twisted in varied textures and hues throughout a shawl. Here you will find views into personal experiences that have shaped each writer, sometimes causing pain, grief, anger, or wonder. In a world where humans are increasingly becoming aware of their own destructive impulses, a sense of urgency, though sometimes subtle, lies behind the lines. What, in this human condition, is worthwhile? The writers burrow deeply into memories, some following clues toward connection and empathy—others seeking clarity of thought and action—because if anything is clearer now than ever before, it’s that consequences can and will happen, and change is required; resistance cannot be shallow, but depends on both openness and carefully thought-out acts that will carry us forward with awareness of “history and all its complex entanglements,” as well as its possible futures.” —Jean Vengua, author of Prau and Corporeal
HUMANITY is available now through Ingram Book Group’s distribution partners: Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Chapters/Indigo (Canada), Waterstones (UK), Booktopia (Australia and New Zealand), and other select bookshops. The anthology’s release price is USD18.00. To donate directly to UNICEF, click here. For more information, email editor@palomapress.net.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Of French, Swiss and Filipino descent, Christine Amour-Levar is a Social Entrepreneur, Environmental Advocate, Marketing Consultant and Author currently based in Singapore, where she lives with her husband and four children. Through Women On A Mission, the non-profit organisation she co-founded in 2012, she has led teams on challenging expeditions to the Arctic, the Middle East, Africa and the Himalayas to raise awareness and funds for women survivors of war and to empower and support women who have been subjected to violence and abuse. An avid believer in women as Gamechangers with unique knowledge and solutions to move the needle on sustainability, Christine recently launched #HERplanetearth, a global women’s advocacy movement that promotes gender equality and the integrity of the environment.
Daniel Atkinson received his PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2011. His research focus is on Afro-American vernacular expression and its interaction with the global landscape. His dissertation research was conducted at the former slave plantation turned world’s largest prison, Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana. The research was designed to serve as a platform to discuss issues of economic disparity and institutional racism as products of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution as well as to preserve some of the remaining a cappella gospel tradition at the prison. That research is now featured at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. He is currently working on the first historical biography of Vaudevillian and founding father of the Harlem Renaissance, George W. “Nash” Walker (1872-1911), and is the curator of the Global Rhythms concert series at Town Hall, Seattle.
Aaron Beasley currently lives in Salt Lake City. He studies in the English department at the University of Utah, and interns for the Eclipse digital archive for small-press writing (eclipsearchive.org). He is co-author with artist Jeremy Kennedy of NOTE TO SEA (Rebel Hands Press 2017).
J. A. Bernstein’s forthcoming novel, RACHEL’S TOMB (New Issues, 2019), won the AWP Award Series, Hackney, and Knut House Prizes. His forthcoming story collection, STICK-LIGHT (Eyewear, 2018), was a finalist for the Robert C. Jones and Beverly Prizes. His work has appeared in Shenandoah, Kenyon Review Online,Tampa Review, Tin House (web), World Literature Today, and other journals. A Chicago-native, he studied Middle Eastern History and Arabic at Brown University and in Jordan on a Fulbright Scholarship. He later completed a Ph.D. in the Creative Writing & Literature Program at the University of Southern California, where he held the Middleton Fellowship. A husband and father of three, he teaches at the University of Southern Mississippi and is the fiction editor of Tikkun.
Cynthia Buiza is the Executive Director of the California Immigrant Policy Center. She moved to the United States 13 years ago and is now based in Los Angeles, California. Prior to that, she worked with various international organizations, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Open Society Institute-Burma Education Project in Thailand, and the Jesuit Refugee Service. She earned a Masters in International Affairs from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, with a concentration on human security studies. Her poetry and prose have appeared in various anthologies in the Philippines and the U.S. She is also the co-author of Anywhere But War, about the armed conflict and internal displacement in the Indonesian Province of Aceh.
John Bloomberg-Rissman is a left coast mashup ethnographer and editor, responsible for what has become a life-work, Zeitgeist Spam. The first three sections (No Sounds of My Own Making; Flux, Clot & Froth; In the House of the Hangman) have been published, and the fourth, With the Noose Around My Neck, begun the day of Trump’s election, is well underway. Among the books he has edited or is in process of editing are (with Jerome Rothenberg) Barbaric Vast & Wild: A Gathering of Outside & Subterranean Poetry from Origins to Present: Poems for the Millennium 5, and (with Richard Lopez and T.C. Marshall) The End of the World Project. He posts stuff at http://www.johnbr.com.
Renato Redentor Constantino manages the Constantino Foundation and the Manila-based international group Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities, which published the award-winning Agam: Filipino Narratives on Climate Change and Uncertainty, composed of 26 images and 24 narratives in verse and prose written in eight languages. His bicycle is named Wyatt Earp.
Rio Constantino is a Filipino high school student who wants to be a biologist someday. Like many others his age, he constantly searches for sleep, alcohol, and an internet connection, in that order.
Robert Cowan is a literature professor and dean at the City University of New York. He’s also the author of The Indo-German Identification: Reconciling South Asian Origins and European Destinies, 1765-1885 (Camden House, 2010) and Teaching Double Negatives: Disadvantage and Dissent at Community College (Peter Lang, 2018).
Melinda Luisa de Jesús is Chair and Associate Professor of Diversity Studies at California College of the Arts. She writes and teaches about Filipinx/American cultural production, girl culture, monsters, and race/ethnicity in the United States. She edited Pinay Power: Peminist Critical Theory, the first anthology of Filipina/American Feminisms (Routledge 2005). Her writing has appeared in Mothering in East Asian Communities: Politics and Practices; Completely Mixed Up: Mixed Heritage Asian North American Writing and Art; Approaches to Teaching Multicultural Comics; Ethnic Literary Traditions in Children’s Literature; Challenging Homophobia; Radical Teacher; The Lion and the Unicorn; Ano Ba Magazine; Rigorous; Konch Magazine; Rabbit and Rose; MELUS; Meridians; The Journal of Asian American Studies, and Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures. She is also a poet and her chapbooks, Humpty Drumpfty and Other Poems, Petty Poetry for SCROTUS Girls’ with poems for Elizabeth Warren and Michelle Obama,Defying Trumplandia, Adios Trumplandia, James Brown’s Wig and Other Poems, and Vagenda of Manicide and Other Poems were published by Locofo Chaps/Moria Poetry in 2017. Her first collection of poetry, peminology, was recently published by Paloma Press (March 2018). She is a mezzo-soprano, a mom, an Aquarian, and admits an obsession with Hello Kitty. More info: http://peminist.com
Gabriela Igloria is a Filipino-American poet. She is currently the editor-in-chief of Granby High School’s literature & arts magazine, The Cupola, and is a student at the Muse Writers Center. She has been published in Rattle’s Young Poet’s Anthology and in Whurk Magazine.
S. Lily Mendoza is a native of San Fernando, Pampanga in Central Luzon, Philippines and is a fluent speaker of Kapampangan and Tagalog. She is Associate Professor of Culture and Communication at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. She is the author of Between the Homeland and the Diaspora: Theorizing Filipino and Filipino American Identities (Routledge, 2002; Philippine revised edition by University of Santo Tomas Publishing, 2006) and lead editor of Back from the Crocodile’s Belly: Philippine Babaylan Studies and the Struggle for Indigenous Memory (Center for Babaylan Studies, 2013; Philippine edition by UST, 2015). She has published widely around questions of identity and belonging, cultural politics in national, post- and trans- national contexts, discourses of indigenization, race and ethnicity, and, more recently, modernity and industrial civilization and what it means to be a human being in the face of climate change and eco-systems collapse. She is currently the Director of the Center for Babaylan Studies.
Laura Mullen is the author of eight books: Complicated Grief, Enduring Freedom: A Little Book of Mechanical Brides, The Surface, After I Was Dead, Subject, Dark Archive, The Tales of Horror, and Murmur. Recognitions for her poetry include Ironwood’s Stanford Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award. Her work has been widely anthologized, and recent poems have been published in The Nation, Conjunctions, and Lana Turner. Her translation of Veronique Pittolo’s Hero is forthcoming from Black Square in 2018.
Mary Pan is a writer and family medicine physician with training in global health and narrative medicine. Her work has been published in several print and online publications including Intima, Blood and Thunder, Hektoen International and Pulse, among others. She lives in Seattle with her husband and three young children. More at marypanwriter.com
Jeanine Pfeiffer is an ethnoecologist exploring biocultural diversity: the connections between nature and culture. A Fulbright scholar, University of California Pacific Rim researcher, and National Science Foundation/National Institutes of Health grantee, Dr. Pfeiffer has worked in over thirty countries. Based in Northern California, she teaches environmental studies at San José State University. Her scientific articles are curated on ResearchGate.net and Academia.edu and her Pushcart-nominated prose can be found in the Bellevue Literary Review, Proximity, Hippocampus, Lowestoft Chronicles, Langscape, Between the Lines, and Nowhere. More at http://www.jeaninepfeiffer.com
Marthe Reed is the author of Nights Reading (Lavender Ink, 2014); Pleth, with j hastain (Unlikely Books, 2013); (em)bodied bliss (Moria Books, 2013); Gaze (Black Radish Books, 2010); and Tender Box, A Wunderkammer (Lavender Ink, 2007). A sixth collection, ARK HIVE, will be published by The Operating System (2019). Her poetry has been published in BAX2014, New American Writing, Golden Handcuffs Review, Entropy, New Orleans Review, Jacket@, Fairy Tale Review, Exquisite Corpse, The Volta, and The Offending Adam, among others. Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing in the Anthropocene, co-edited with Linda Russo, will be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2018. Reed was co-publisher and managing editor for Black Radish Books and lived in Syracuse, NY.
Karen Bryant Shipp is a singer, organist, and choral director who works as Minister of Music at Oakhurst Baptist Church in Decatur, GA, a progressive Baptist church where she is given the freedom to explore not only all kinds of music, but other religions and ideas. Karen was ordained at Oakhurst in November 2010.
Murzban F. Shroff has published his stories with over 60 literary journals in the U.S. and UK. His fiction has appeared in journals like The Gettysburg Review, The Minnesota Review, The Saturday Evening Post, Chicago Tribune, and World Literature Today. His non-fiction has appeared in India Abroad, The New Engagement, and The American Scholar. Shroff is the winner of the John Gilgun Fiction Award and has garnered six Pushcart Prize nominations, the highest award for the short story in the U.S. His short story collection, Breathless in Bombay, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in the best debut category from Europe and South Asia, and rated by the Guardian as among the ten best Mumbai books. His novel, Waiting For Jonathan Koshy, was a finalist for the Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize. Shroff represented Mumbai at the London Short Story Festival and was invited to speak about his work at the Gandhi Memorial Center in Maryland, University of California Los Angeles, California State University Monterey Bay, the Institute for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley, and the Annenberg School for Communications & Journalism at the University of Southern California. He can be contacted at murzbanfshroff@gmail.com.
Leny Mendoza Strobel is Professor of American Multicultural Studies at Sonoma State University. She is also one of the Founding Directors of the Center for Babaylan Studies. Her books, journal articles, online media presence reflects her decades-long study and reflections on the process of decolonization and healing of colonial trauma through the lens of indigenous perspectives. She is a grandmother to Noah and she tends a garden and chickens with Cal in Northern California.
Rodrigo Toscano’s newest book of poetry is Explosion Rocks Springfield (Fence Books, 2016). Previous books include Deck of Deeds, Collapsible Poetics Theater (a National Poetry Series selection), To Leveling Swerve, Platform, Partisans, and The Disparities. He works for the Labor Institute in conjunction with the United Steelworkers, the National Institute for Environmental Health Science, Communication Workers of America, and National Day Laborers Organizing Network, working on educational / training projects that involve environmental and labor justice, health & safety culture transformation, and immigrant worker rights.
Audrey Ward is an author (Hidden Biscuits, Wipf & Stock, 2015), writer and poet; an ordained clergywoman in the United Methodist Church, and the mother of two daughters and a son, grandmother of four granddaughters and two grandsons. However, the importance of the above roles are, here, in reverse: She considers the last, that of parent and grandparent to be her number one all-pervasive education and worthwhile endeavor of her lifetime, a source of great pride and exasperation.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Eileen R. Tabios loves books and has released over 50 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in nine countries and cyberspace. Publications include three Selected Poems projects, YOUR FATHER IS BALD: Selected Hay(na)ku Poems, INVENT(ST)ORY: Selected Catalog Poems & New 1996-2015 and THE THORN ROSARY: Selected Prose Poems & New 1998-2010; the first book-length haybun collection, 147 MILLION ORPHANS (MMXI-MML); a collected novel, SILK EGG; an experimental autobiography AGAINST MISANTHROPY; two bilingual editions, the English/Romanian I FORGOT ARS POETICA / AM UITAT ARTA POETICA and the English/Spanish ONE, TWO, THREE: Hay(na)ku / UNO DOS TRES: Hay(na)ku. Her award-winning body of work includes invention of the hay(na)ku poetic form (whose 15th year anniversary is celebrated in 2018 with exhibitions, readings and a book launch at the San Francisco Public Library) as well as a first poetry book, BEYOND LIFE SENTENCES (1998), which received the Philippines’ National Book Award for Poetry (Manila Critics Circle). Her poems have been translated into eight languages as well as computer-generated hybrid languages, paintings, video, drawings, visual poetry, mixed media collages, Kali martial arts, music, modern dance, sculpture and a sweat shirt. Additionally, she has edited or conceptualized 14 anthologies of poetry, fiction and essays; founded and edits the online journals GALATEA RESURRECTS (A Poetry Engagement) and The Halo-Halo Review; founded and manages the literary arts press Meritage Press; and has exhibited visual art and visual poetry in the United States and Asia.
PALOMA PRESS 