The AmeRican Poet: Essays on the Work of Tato Laviera

The AmeRican Poet: Essays on the Work of Tato Laviera is a collection of thirteen essays, an introduction and a foreword by fifteen established and emerging scholars. Known as a Nuyorican poet, Laviera is more appropriately celebrated as an AmeRican writer of national and international prominence. As a whole, the essays discuss diverse aspects of Laviera’s life and substantial body of work that includes five published collections of poetry, twelve written and staged plays, and many years of political, social, literary and healthcare activism. They focus on Laviera’s use of language; relationship to writers from the island (Luis Pales Matos, Jose Luis Gonzalez, and Luis Munoz Marin) and mainland (Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman); his concern for mestizaje; Afro-Latinoness; music, sound and rhythm; utopian spaces; code switching; Civil Rights and feminist movements; Mexican migrant students and homeless people, among others. Uniquely, the anthology features a testimonio composed of interviews in which the author speaks in English, Spanish and Spanglish, four unpublished poems, and the play King of Cans. This collection confirms Tato Laviera’s much deserved reputation as a major poet in any language.