Margarita Engle (@margaritapoet) shares DREAMS FROM MANY RIVERS: A HISPANIC HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES TOLD IN POEMS. Margarita blends voices of real people with fictionalized accounts in order to create a book of many voices and many experiences in order to represent hispanic history in the U.S. Choosing poetry as her vessel helped to make the history personal, bringing us closer to the characters and speaking to our present through moments of the past. It’s quite an exceptional work and I hope you’ll be equally moved when you read it, let alone from this conversation. Something that really stuck with me is Margarita’s reminder that we often fail to acknowledge the diversity within the diversity. DREAMS FROM MANY RIVERS does an outstanding job of doing exactly that through intimacy and a shared historical context.
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ON TODAY'S EPISODE:
When the babysitter is unable to come, Daniel is woken out of bed and joins his parents as they head downtown for their jobs as nighttime office cleaners. But the story is about more than brooms, mops, and vacuums. Mama and Papa turn the deserted office building into a magnificent kingdom filled with paper. Then they weave a fantasy of dragons and kings to further engage their reluctant companion--and even encourage him to one day be the king of a paper kingdom.
The Paper Kingdom expresses the joy and spirit of a loving family who turn a routine and ordinary experience into something much grander. Magical art by Pascal Campion shows both the real world and the fantasy through the eyes of the young narrator.
SHOW NOTES:
Margarita Engle (website)
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