How do you know if you're in or out? I don't mean as in belly button, nor as in exuviae of animals who've clearly moved on after the moult, leaving the old skin or carapace behind as if it were so last season, wouldn't be caught dead in it! I come across this passage in a magazine: you know you're an outsider when even supposedly on the inside, you don't feel like an insider. How true! Is it merely because fashion's fickle like that, or because people are [pick one: xenophobic, nationalistic, racist, sexist, ethnocentric, intolerant]? Perhaps if you really were inside you might be able to say the things you bottle up for fear of repercussion. Perhaps, if you really were inside, that promotion might have come ten years ago. They'd finally spell your name right on every correspondence. They wouldn't tap you on the shoulder to ask for silverware. Are your credentials real, your words stolen? Do they still follow you around the store just for ogling the ridiculously high-end merchandise?
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) is the 2023 Immigrant Writing Series prize winner for Caulbearer: Poems (due out from Black Lawrence Press in 2024), and Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, September 2020). She was appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia for 2020-22, and in 2021 received 1 of 23 Poet Laureate Fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation. She is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of What is Left of Wings, I Ask (2018 Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Chapbook Prize, selected by former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey); Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014 May Swenson Prize), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She is a member of the core faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University which she directed from 2009-2015; she also teaches classes at The Muse Writers’ Center in Norfolk. In 2018, she was the inaugural Glasgow Distinguished Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University. When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she cooks with her family, knits, hand-binds books, and listens to tango music.