A South Side Girl's Guide to Love and Sex. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.A South Side Girl's Guide to Love and Sex

As a child of Puerto Rican migrants on Chicago’s Southside, Mayda’s Del Valle’s poetry utilizes part Spanish and English, part hip-hop and salsa, part Nas and Sonia Sanchez, part Shakespeare and John Leguizamo. It is inherited history as well as traditions remixed and invented. Del Valle creates autobiographical narratives that utilize spoken word poetry and music, intended equally for the page and live performance. Rooted in the aesthetics of hip-hop and the urban Latino experience, the poems here explore themes of healing, transformation, and the recovery of ancestral memory in the modern-day diaspora. The beauty of this collection is that the poet manages to curate the flow such that the reader can DJ the poems―arrange their own set and thus, to borrow a phrase from that system, “spin” their own performance.

Mayda Del Valle is author of “The University of Hip Hop” and a winner of the 2016 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize from Northwestern University Press. She appeared on six episodes of the HBO series Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, and was a contributing writer and original cast member of the Tony Award winning Def Poetry Jam on Broadway. A gifted performer, Del Valle has read her work at venues all over the world including the White House.