Publications

There are moments when beauties come into being—the unbelievably small feet of a new born in your now grown hand, a salmon sky painted with cross-stitched contrails over a background of storm clouds—always or often where imbalance touches the border of another imbalance. Found: balance: a puzzle piece hanging off the table still grasping the edge of another.

During the summer, I worked with Glocally Connected — a nonprofit group founded by Sherry Mackay and Selin Yildiz Nielsen that provides free English classes primarily for Afghan and Syrian women refugees, and art and creative writing lessons for the children. In the introduction to her novel, “The House on Mango Street," Sandra Cisneros says, "I write about my students because I don’t know what else to do with their stories. Writing them down allows me to sleep."

My skin revolts at the flame of saying things I shouldn’t have, of falling into a guise too loose & too tight to handle He talks as if he swallowed leaves the crunchy sound of ego sprawled on the tile, punch me, please, but I know better

When you were born, you missed the shore and dropped into the evening ocean. Where the waves crack the surface and you sink into darkness further from the sky. You’re caught in perpetual breast-stroke for the shivering air above, for the moist, raw shore of high tide.

the bed may have been rumpled. our legs crescents of unmeaningful lilts drive into the bed skirt pushed early to flower, fraught to conceal our steep, off-pitch giggles. our mom’s face warps yellow & mistaken—we burst light bulbs misread in all directions—she thinks our bodies point at her, a hole in her sock or her coffee coils too electric. she, we, our arms a grove of disheveled yarn

As the sourness subdues my craving, the pickle bites memory into my tongue. When I was 12, I would chase pickles with creamy whole-milk, feel the milk shock my teeth like someone hooked jumper cables up to each tooth. My mom saw my scrunched face and laughed, That’s the same combination I’d crave when I was pregnant with you.

On a stroll through San Bernardino’s business district last weekend, I came across a woman on a street corner gripping a teetering stack of fliers and an empty Big Gulp. As she struggled to hold everything in place, the Big Gulp slipped from the nook of her elbow, spilling the fliers all over the sidewalk. With a sigh, she bent down to collect them. A long-haired dachshund patiently watched the scene by her side.

  Songs After Memory Fractures is a conjunction of yowls and whispers that recognizes life as the longest, truest measure of time—confronting the real terror of loss and the even greater surprise of it. Each page operates with a reluctance to denounce the confusion of longing for memory, while avoiding exaggerated sentimentality, and delivering “history no one knew would be lost.” This powerful work unveils a necessity to address our origins if we are ever to reconcile our mangled vitality. --Chance Castro   The speaker in Songs After Memory Fractures invokes her scattered memories among “wet footprints” that vanish, allowing us to witness an expansive and fierce imagination at work, poem after poem. --Juan Delgado   Songs After Memory Fractures is itself a song with chase of loss as chorus, with disintegrating moments of beauty as backbeat, and the echoing pain drives the volume. As we run down empty streets of recollection, Songs After Memory Fractures is the one unbroken street light, dripping insight into the journey of love as place, of time as a fading photograph, of death as “a river burning” on repeat. --Bolin Jue  

THE BEIGING OF AMERICA, BEING MIXED RACE IN THE 21ST CENTURY, takes on “race matters” and considers them through the firsthand accounts of mixed race people in the United States. Edited by mixed race scholars Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Sean Frederick Forbes and Tara Betts, this collection consists of 39 poets, writers, teachers, professors, artists and activists, whose personal narratives articulate the complexities of interracial life. Discrimination, instilling pride in family settings, sorting out the terms and names that people call themselves and their relatives, tackling colorism within communities of color, and childhood recollections fill these pages with compelling stories that speak to lived experiences, mapping a new ethnic terrain that transcends racial and cultural division

With the support of a California Humanities grant, Inlandia Literary Laureate Nikia Chaney, initiated a Voices Against Violence project, which uses the arts to address the violence experienced in Inland Empire communities.

Until I went on disability, I didn’t realize the state of neglect in which I have left my soul.

Cati Porter’s beautiful meditations breathe humanity into the usually one-dimensional frame with which we look at mothers and motherhood.

The best facilitators make a session comfortable, listen well and point out where a “voice could better shine”

[fiction] the grandma would cut nopales from her backyard nopalera. a tower of pencas. the long blade biting its way through the stem. but it was infected. white pimples growing on its shell. when i would pop them. they would release a wave of purple. staining the smooth penca with sin [...]

A series of key questions can guide you to composing the best piece possible

The pleasure of reading includes experiencing what the narrator observes

It might take more time and more hope to encounter the right words, but it can mean the difference between a good day and a painful memory.

Storytelling should not just be seen as an entertaining pastime but an integral part of both our society and overall humanity.

Stories belong to us, and every person involved simultaneously shares a piece of that story, Allyson Jeffredo writes.

The written word helps us understand history, build empathy, be present, and envision a better world, writes Allyson Jeffredo.