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ire'ne lara silva
ire’ne lara silva, the 2023 Texas State Poet Laureate, is the author of four poetry collections, furia, Blood Sugar Canto, CUICACALLI/House of Song, and FirstPoems, two chapbooks, Enduring Azucares and Hibiscus Tacos, and a short story collection, flesh to bone, which won the Premio Aztlán.ire’ne is the recipient of a 2021 Tasajillo Writers Grant, a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, and was the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award. Most recently, ire’ne was awarded the 2021 Texas Institute of Letters Shrake Award for Best Short Nonfiction. ire’ne is currently a Writer at Large for Texas Highways Magazine and is working on a second collection of short stories titled, the light of your body. A new poetry collection, the eaters of flowers, is forthcoming from Saddle Road Press in January 2024. Her first comic book, VENDAVAL, will be released by the Chispa Imprint of Scout Comics in April 2024. http://www.irenelarasilva.wordpress.com
BOOKS
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Rooted in a Chicana/Latina/indigenous geographic and cultural sensibility, the stories of flesh to bone take on the force of myth, old and new, giving voice to those who experience the disruption and violence of the borderlands. In these nine tales, Silva metes out a furious justice—a whirling, lyrical energy—that scatters the landscape with bones of transformation, reclamation, and healing.
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Imaniman
Poets Reflecting in the Anzaldúan Borderlands
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In homage to Gloria Anzaldúa and her iconic work Borderlands/La Frontera, award-winning poets ire’ne lara silva and Dan Vera have assembled the work of 54 writers who reflect on the complex terrain—the deeply felt psychic, social, and geopolitical borderlands—that Anzaldúa inhabited, theorized, explored, and invented.
PRAISE FOR FLESH TO BONE
…An original and authentic voice…with a unique vision. A blend of indigenismo and folktales retold in a modern vein…these stories come from the clouds, from spirits of ancient ancestors, from the oblique corners of the human consciousness…A new and engaging duende is born.
—Alejandro Murguia, author of This War Called Love
If Chagall had written, he would have painted words in the fierce brushstrokes of ire’ne lara silva’s stories. If Remedios Varo had told stories, she would have wound the tendrils of her magic the way ire’ne lara silva paints her world.
—Cecile Pineda, author Devil’s Tango: How I Learned the Fukushima Step by Step
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ire’ne lara silva writes about what’s between dark shadow and daylight, when, as on the Day of the Dead, we are so aware of the sacred. Though fiction, ire’ne’s prose seems to transform into chanting verse.
—Dagoberto Gilb, author of Before the End, After the Beginning: Stories
In her brilliant fiction debut, flesh to bone, ire’ne lara silva uses hauntingly lyrical language to tell stories cast in the Latin American tradition of Juan Rulfo and Maria Luisa Bombal. But, do not mistake this work for magical realism. The fantastical elements, raw voices, and shifting realities inhabit an emotional, psychological, and all-too-physical landscape of loss and violence. Life-affirming and intense, the stories sweep us into another world where we come face to face with the deepest truths. Brava!
—Norma Cantú, author of Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera