Luz Aguirre

Voces Con Eco: Writing from Mano a Mano Luz Aguirre

Publisher Marketing: Every Monday at Mano a Mano, a New York center dedicated to celebrating Mexican culture, the members of NY Writers Coalition's Spanish language creative writing workshop gather to slough off the prodigious stresses of their city lives through writing. The expectation and camaraderie of the assembling group is thrilling. Though most of "Los Lunes" ("The Monday People," as they call themselves on their blog http: //loslunes.wordpress.com) have some level of bilingual skills, they choose to write in Spanish (spiced with a good dose of English and Spanglish). Mano a Mano is a safe space for them to meet and express those sentiments that may have deep roots from Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and New York, and are heart-stoppingly borderless in their humanity. Voces con Eco is a collection of poetry and prose generated in this unique collective. "The voices in Voces con Eco are small--and very large--miracles. They sing from the heart, and they write from the soul, and they engage the mind. It's important, and blessed, work. I salute them." -Luis Alberto Urrea, 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the 2004 Lannan Literary Award for The Devil's Highway "Reading Voces con Eco is like watching buds come out in spring. Lovely, heartening and more than a little awe-inspiring." -David Lida, author of First Stop in the New World and Travel Advisory Contributor Bio:  Sanger, Mary Ellen Yvonne Garrett has been published in several music & literary magazines. She has an MFA (The New School) and is currently working toward a Ph. D. (Drew University). She is Senior Fiction Editor for Black Lawrence Press. Mary Ellen Sanger is a poet and writing workshop leader now writing from Fort Collins, Colorado (after 17 years in Mexico and 10 in NYC). Her prison memoir, "Blackbirds in the Pomegranate Tree" was published in 2013. She leads weekly workshops for the women incarcerated in the Larimer County Detention Center, and is a nonprofit administrator by day.