Tia Chucha Press is fundraising
The Wandering Song Reprint
The Birth of a New Anthology
As soon as its original release in 2017 from Tia Chucha Press, established in 1989, The Wandering Song, a first-ever Central American anthology shared its story all around the country and immediately sold out. Authors requested more copies, teachers sought it out, students wanted to use it for reference, and media wanted copies to review.
The Wandering Song is unique in that it captures the Central American story with multiple voices representing their homes, challenges, triumphs, and human experience; whether assimilating into a complex North American standard of living or preserving the delicacies of culture and family tradition. With over 60 authors in this collection, these voices capture a community often overlooked.
The Wandering Song is a multi-genre collection—including poems, short stories, essays, memoir or novel excerpts, and creative nonfiction—the book showcases writers who render a multiplicity of experiences, as refugees from the wars of the 1980s to those who barely remember the homeland or who were born in el norte. There are writers from both coasts and from the middle. Their aesthetics range from hip-hop inflected to high literary to acrobatics in Spanglish. Yet it is a community that shares a history of violence—both here and back home—and the hope and healing that ensures its survival. They include migrants or children of migrants from countries in the so-called Northern Triangle—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—considered one of the most violent places on earth, as well as from Belize, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panamá.
Why Reprint The Wandering Song
Celebrating 30 years as a thriving small press, Tia Chucha Press has survived on bare bones operational budget. Typically we publish 2 titles a year and most of our publishing efforts have upfront costs. With this, it has been difficult to reprint The Wandering Song ourselves.
With much praise from our community of scholars, authors, friends, and literary enthusiasts, The Wandering Song has been well received and sought after. We have academics from all over the country inquiring about this anthology with an interest of including it in their curriculum. It is with the fiery resilience of our readership, and the support of our authors, that we are seeking to raise the monies needed to reprint The Wandering Song.
What It Takes
Our goal is to raise $6000 in order to edit, reprint, market, and distribute 1000 copies of the anthology.
Our deadline is to raise this money by August 16, 2020
This way we can get it onto our print schedule for a tentative debut in Fall 2020.
With your support, we are confident that this anthology would make its way into mass academia, representing real Central American narratives, and offering these perspectives to students and readers. This book creates community amongst its readership and brings a ‘lil piece of home to each of us...because we are all wanderers, and see ourselves inside each others’ stories. Sometimes we say things the same way, sometimes we change it up, but it all comes back to the human connection we all share; enjoying the same sun, and living under the same sky.
Mil gracias!
Jessica M. Wilson Cardenas
Tia Chucha Press Coordinator
More Resources
The Wandering Song websites:
https://www.tiachucha.org/the_wandering_song_central_american_writing_in_the_united_states
http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/wandering-song
The Wandering Song in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
https://larbpublab.com/central-american-writers/
As soon as its original release in 2017 from Tia Chucha Press, established in 1989, The Wandering Song, a first-ever Central American anthology shared its story all around the country and immediately sold out. Authors requested more copies, teachers sought it out, students wanted to use it for reference, and media wanted copies to review.
The Wandering Song is unique in that it captures the Central American story with multiple voices representing their homes, challenges, triumphs, and human experience; whether assimilating into a complex North American standard of living or preserving the delicacies of culture and family tradition. With over 60 authors in this collection, these voices capture a community often overlooked.
The Wandering Song is a multi-genre collection—including poems, short stories, essays, memoir or novel excerpts, and creative nonfiction—the book showcases writers who render a multiplicity of experiences, as refugees from the wars of the 1980s to those who barely remember the homeland or who were born in el norte. There are writers from both coasts and from the middle. Their aesthetics range from hip-hop inflected to high literary to acrobatics in Spanglish. Yet it is a community that shares a history of violence—both here and back home—and the hope and healing that ensures its survival. They include migrants or children of migrants from countries in the so-called Northern Triangle—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—considered one of the most violent places on earth, as well as from Belize, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panamá.
Why Reprint The Wandering Song
Celebrating 30 years as a thriving small press, Tia Chucha Press has survived on bare bones operational budget. Typically we publish 2 titles a year and most of our publishing efforts have upfront costs. With this, it has been difficult to reprint The Wandering Song ourselves.
With much praise from our community of scholars, authors, friends, and literary enthusiasts, The Wandering Song has been well received and sought after. We have academics from all over the country inquiring about this anthology with an interest of including it in their curriculum. It is with the fiery resilience of our readership, and the support of our authors, that we are seeking to raise the monies needed to reprint The Wandering Song.
What It Takes
Our goal is to raise $6000 in order to edit, reprint, market, and distribute 1000 copies of the anthology.
Our deadline is to raise this money by August 16, 2020
This way we can get it onto our print schedule for a tentative debut in Fall 2020.
With your support, we are confident that this anthology would make its way into mass academia, representing real Central American narratives, and offering these perspectives to students and readers. This book creates community amongst its readership and brings a ‘lil piece of home to each of us...because we are all wanderers, and see ourselves inside each others’ stories. Sometimes we say things the same way, sometimes we change it up, but it all comes back to the human connection we all share; enjoying the same sun, and living under the same sky.
Mil gracias!
Jessica M. Wilson Cardenas
Tia Chucha Press Coordinator
More Resources
The Wandering Song websites:
https://www.tiachucha.org/the_wandering_song_central_american_writing_in_the_united_states
http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/wandering-song
The Wandering Song in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
https://larbpublab.com/central-american-writers/
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