What is a “Nuyorican”? And what does it mean? Poet, writer and activist Samuel Diaz Carrion explores this question and more in OUR NUYORICAN THING, THE BIRTH OF A SELF-MADE IDENTITY. What started out as blog correspondence for the Nuyorican Poets Café’s website (2001-2004), quickly turned into a cultural exchange about the Café and Puerto Rican culture. OUR NUYORICAN THING is a compendium of those blog entries and emails that also include poetry, short prose and historical photographs about the Nuyorican experience through the eyes of Diaz Carrion, a “Puerto Rican Indiana Jones” who has quietly studied “the trade route of a new language . . . collecting poetry and stories as the artifacts of the day.” This collection is riveting, informative and delightful, and will satisfy any reader with a cultural appetite. Cover design: Clare Ultimo.
Contributors
Introduction by Urayoán Noel
URAYOÁN NOEL is a Puerto Rican poet, critic, translator, and performer who teaches at New York Univer-sity and Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas. He is the author of the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (2014), winner of the LASA Latino Studies Book Award, and eight books of poetry, including Boringkén (2008), named a Book of the Year by El Nuevo Día, and Transversal (2021), named a Book of the Year by the New York Public Library Book and also longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. Noel’s translations include No Budu Please by Wingston González (2018) and adjacent islands by Nicole Cecilia Delgado (2022).
Here's What People Are Saying
“If you ever wanted to know about the Nuyorican experience from a sociological viewpoint, then get OUR NUYORICAN THING in your possession. This book will provide deep insight and firsthand observations on the Nuyorican movement from the inside out.” ~Bonafide Rojas, author of When The City Sleeps (2012) and Renovatio (2014)
“OUR NUYORICAN THING by Sam Diaz is a must read about all things Nuyorican in essays that emerged from the heart of the Mother Matrix, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe . . . a poetic buffet for the universal creative spirit that is comprehensive, intelligent, insightful, sensitive, and beautifully written “. . . in the service of poetry.” Bravo! ~Sandra María Esteves, poet, teacher and activist
In OUR NUYORICAN THING Sam Diaz, an original from the time the Nuyorican poets first walked as in Genesis, deconstructs and reconstructs all of those assumptions of identity and poetry that wonders identity. Take the plunge, you may find your own “Nuyoness.” ~Keith Roach, poet, author, activist, and former Nuyorican Poets Cafe SlamMaster
Sam Diaz Carrion sets out to tackle the ever-ephemeral nature of the human being. His words and stream of consciousness are an embodiment of humanity’s nature; an ever fickle, vacillating, equivocal species. In these pages, he takes his readers through the labyrinth that is the human. ~Nancy Mercado, Ph.D., writer, poet and editor
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