Order In the Belly of Night and Other Poems at Eulalia Books.
In the Belly of Night and Other Poems
Poems by Irma Pineda, translated by Wendy Call
(Pluralia, 2022)
This collection of poetry by Mexican-Zapotec poet Irma Pineda, which I selected and translated to English, represents four her first five poetry collections. National Book Award winner Daniel Borzutzky says, “Irma Pineda’s poems and Wendy Call’s translations evoke tragedy and celebrate the ways in which the human is built from dream, tradition, and nature. Self-translated as ‘mirror poems’ by Pineda, from Isthmus Zapotec into Spanish, and then translated into English through a complex process that is fascinatingly articulated by Call, the trilingual poems in this collection show us how translation serves as a means of cultural preservation and political resistance to the forces that seek to criminalize languages or dangerously render them extinct. In these poems, rivers have disappeared into deserts, the dead are honored and celebrated, language transforms pain into meaning, memory, and light.”
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Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide
co-edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call (Penguin, 2007)
Called "...one of the best books available on narrative nonfiction writing" by Poets and Writers and “a virtuoso collection of essays” by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, this craft anthology, which I co-edited with Mark Kramer, is widely used in journalism and creative writing classrooms. We created this anthology from sessions at an annual narrative nonfiction conference held at Harvard University for several years—a project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. With short essays by forty-five well-known literary journalists, from Malcolm Gladwell to Isabel Wilkerson, the Library Journal notes that Telling True Stories “provides pointed but wide-ranging advice on writing — a good illustration of the creativity behind nonfiction and the individuality of the writing process. There is enough variety for almost any nonfiction writer to find inspiration and guidance.”
You can read a review of Telling True Stories here.
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No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy
by Wendy Call (University of Nebraska Press, 2011)
No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy traces small-town life as the big-box economy comes to town. I devoted a decade to reporting, researching and writing this narrative nonfiction book, which won the 2011 Grub Street National Book Prize for Nonfiction and the 2012 International Latino Book Award for Best History / Political Book.
Author Sandra Cisneros says of No Word for Welcome, “Fascinating. Beautifully written. Deeply researched. With sensitivity and respect, Wendy Call has written about the modernization of a centuries-old community. This is a book written with humility, bravery, and wisdom, and honors those who trusted the writer with their incredible stories.”
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