Women Writers Series V:Demetria Martinez, Naomi Ayala

Demetria Martinez is the winner of the Western States Book Award for Fiction for her first novel, Mother Tongue (Ballantine, 1996).

She earned her B.A. from Princeton University?s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She later studied sacred art at Sagrada Art School and began writing poetry. In 1987, she was charged with conspiring against the U.S. government and aiding the entry of Salvadorans into the country; the charges carried a 25 year prison sentence. In 1988 a jury acquitted her on First Amendment grounds. Martinez is author of Breathing Between the Line (University Press, 1997) and Turning. She is working on a second novel, Mexican Rubies, and teaches at the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences, Univ. of Mass, Boston.

In lyrical, original language expressing anger, hope optimism and a fierce independence, Naomi Ayala explores being Puerto Rican on the mainland, displaying cultural pride coupled with the pain of exclusion, vividly describing her encounters with racism, poverty, and the power of love. She migrated from Puerto Rico as an adolescent and has settled in New Haven, Connecticut. After years of work as a translator, cour interpreter, and high school teacher, she now works as a Master Teaching Artist with primary and secondary schools, prisons and community centers. Her work has appeared in the Village Voice Literary Supplement, Calloloo, The Creative Resistance, Puerto Rican Women in the US (Third Woman Press and elsewhere. Wild Animals on the Moon (Curbstone Press, 1997) is her first book of poems.