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Contributor Notes
“Tamale Feet” and “Blue Funnel” are poems inspired by my mother, Lisbet. These poems address some of the challenges that Latinas/os often face, such as media (mis)representations, economic struggles, and language barriers.
Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez is a Guatemalan-American writer based in Los Angeles, California. She recently received her BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from California State University, Long Beach, where she pursued her research on Plath’s adaptation of Coleridge. This was the subject of her senior thesis, McNair Scholars project, and article “Beware / Beware: Coleridgean Surrogacy in Plath’s Father Figure Poems,” published in the 2013 Online CSULB McNair Journal. She has presented at several academic conferences, including the Sylvia Plath Symposium 2012 at Indiana University, Bloomington, and has poems forthcoming in Plath Profiles.
She is currently working on a series of poems about Guatemalan/Central American identity, and state-sanctioned disappearance and violence in Guatemala during the 1970s and 1980s. This fall, she will continue writing poetry and pursue her research in the Literature PhD Program at University of California, Santa Cruz. Contact her at gabrielaramirez51@gmail.com.
