Shore Shorn [Excerpt]

Deborah Paredez is a poet, performance scholar, and cultural critic. She is the author of the critical study Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke University Press, 2009) and of the poetry volumes This Side of Skin (Wings Press, 2002) and Year of the Dog (BOA, 2020), which was the recipient of the 2020 Writers’ League of Texas Award in Poetry. Her book of literary nonfiction, American Diva, is forthcoming from Norton. Paredez is a cofounder of CantoMundo, a national organization for Latinx poetry, and a professor of creative writing and ethnic studies at Columbia University.

Marina Romani is a multimedia artist, translator, educator, and performer of Western classical music and Afro-Caribbean music. Her photography and poetry work focuses on chosen family, queerness, personal and historical memory, bereavement, languages and dialects, and care work. She holds a PhD from UC Berkeley, and her honors include fellowships from the Townsend Center for the Humanities and the UC Berkeley Arts Research Center. Romani is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley, and since 2016 she has held the position of Resident Scholar and Expert for the UN Women’s Global Voices Film Festival. She currently resides in her tiny rural village of Abruzzo, Italy, and the Bay Area, California.