Fourth Generation Chicana Unicorn | Angela Acosta

Angela Acosta, Ph.D. (she/her) is a bilingual Mexican American poet and Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina. Her creative and academic work center on imagining possible worlds and preserving the cultural legacies of women writers. She is a 2022 Dream Foundry Contest for Emerging Writers Finalist, 2022 Somos en Escrito Extra-Fiction Contest Honorable Mention, and Rhysling finalist. Her writing has appeared in Copihue Poetry, Shoreline of Infinity, Apparition Lit, Radon Journal, and Space & Time. She is author of the Elgin nominated poetry collections Summoning Space Travelers (Hiraeth Publishing, 2022) and A Belief in Cosmic Dailiness (Red Ogre Review, 2023). She has published on female life-writing, poetry, and literary personas in Persona Studies, Ámbitos Feministas, and Feminist Modernist Studies.

More of her work is available to read here: https://www.chillsubs.com/user/a314acosta

 

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Angela Acosta’s writing takes us on a journey that is both unique and recognizable, that simultaneously seeks out her ancestors and pays homage to their accomplishments, as women and writers, as scholars and revolutionaries. Removed from her antepasados by time, geography, language, and death, she revives día de los muertos by building altars, and lining “the freeway with the scent of marigolds” inviting them to eat, and to perform “a skeleton dance with wide skirts” alongside her in a joyful and necessary reunion.

Como la mariposa monarca whose migration takes “five generations of butterflies,” Acosta is both rooted in a place and culture, and “rhizomatic,” seeking to connect with all of her family histories.  Though hidden, they have molded her in ways others cannot see (and often misunderstand), and they “help those of us four-five-six times removed” to regain their multilingual tongues, their forgotten literatures, their ancestral knowledge: “We break from the binary model / of the praised canon and forgotten others / proposing new frameworks / for all the constellations of literatures, peoples.” Such restructuring is essential, for her personally, and for our divided world. These poems are the link we need between past, present, and future, for “the adventure / continues across many lifetimes.”

Elisa A. Garza, author of Regalos and Between the Light /entre la claridad