The Border Arts: Beyond the Barriers is LIVE and available for purchase. (CLICK HERE for a short sample of what's inside.) 

For the next several days we will be posting each of our contributors' bios and pictures here in the order that they appear in the anthology "Contributor Bios" page. 

The aim of this publication was to showcase some of the artistic talent that often gets overlooked by some when topics of the US-Mexico border arise. The artists and writers who contributed to the Border Arts: Beyond the Barriers anthology are some of the most accomplished. These are their bios...
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The Raving Press has done it again! We are raising the profile of border life with our newest anthology of art and literature by authors, artists and photographers called "Border Arts: Beyond the Barriers". 

This anthology was realized with the participation of nearly 40 authors and artists all writing from or about the U.S.-Mexico border states. Some of these artists and authors have extensive publishing careers and experience in the the publishing field working as writers, photographers, journalists, and editors for such big name enterprises as the Miami Herald, the New York Times and other organizations. 

​Other authors and artists may not be so firmly established in their respective fields, but their works included here reflect a love, talent, and appreciation of border life that needs to be seen and read in every corner of our nation. 

The border arts reflect the real face of the people and cultures straddling this invisible line between nations. It is not a clear, pristine image. It is a chaotic, complicated one. It cannot be accused of villainy outright, nor granted sainthood altogether. But the overall product of its activity and existence is one with a magnitude of great global influence artistically and culturally. We are the artists, photographers, authors, and publishers shaping the reality of the border like sculptors working with stone. These are the stories and images of the border. These are the border arts.

The Raving Press is set to publish its latest anthology "Border Arts: Beyond the Barriers" by November 30, 2022! 

This anthology is a collection of poetry, short stories, art, and photography by artists and authors from (or writing about) the border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

Check out the book cover!!!!
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Psych! Sorry, we're not quite ready to fully display the images. But rest assured that the cover will kick butt just like all our other book covers. Stay tuned. Remember, November 30 is our slated publishing date (barring some natural disaster). 

Submissions call: Border Arts: Beyond the Barriers anthology

The countdown to the submissions deadline is speeding up. Only 15 days left! 

We are looking for visual arts like drawing, photography, still shots from locally (from border states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas) produced independent films, and more. Basically, if you have ever taken a good picture of your surroundings, like buildings, rivers, desert, forests, events, or life in it's everyday happenings; or if you have drawn these topics and you're connected to the border states of Cali, Texas, Arizona, and New Mex., send us your work!



Professional and amateur works are welcome and encouraged. Basically, if it is something you would share on social media freely, it's something you should send to us. If your work is selected, it will represent the arts and life of our border states as it is now for posterity. Remember, this will be a major publication project!

Send your submissions to theravingpress@gmail.com. Multiple submissions of multiple mediums are welcome. So, if you are submitting photography and have a poem, send it too! 

(All visual art submissions selected for publication in the Border Arts: Beyond the Barriers anthology will be in black and white, except for works selected for the cover.)

Let's do this!

Check out our guidelines flyer on our submissions page. 

We're receiving submissions from around the country by authors who have known the US-Mexico border but few are actually living here. We'd like to encourage border authors and artists to submit your works too! This bilingual English/Spanish language anthology is about you. 

If you are an artist, photographer, author, or otherwise a creative with something to share on this publication, submit your work before the deadline of September 15, 2022. 

Go to SUBMISSIONS for more information on the submissions guidelines.

Or simply email us at theravingpress@gmail.com and send us your work today!

There's No Murder in Baseball        
​by E. O'Neill
                            
When the game is tied in the bottom of the ninth with one out and a runner standing on third, it's perfectly acceptable for the batter to make an out if it gets the runner home safely. It's known as a "sacrifice" and it has determined the outcome of many games. Managers examine the situation, determine the likelihood of "success", and the choice to sacrifice the possibility of a runner on first as opposed to the winning run crossing home plate. 

​We're faced with decisions that regard sacrifice constantly. When we take a longer route to avoid traffic we sacrifice gas to gain time. We've determined that the time gained is more important to us than the cost of the fuel we burn. Buying fresh oranges by weight will leave you with rinds going in the trash. You were aware of the cost and loss before you bought the fruit. You made the necessary sacrifice to gain fresh O.J.

The batter that hit the ground ball and drove in the winning run was not murdered upon being thrown out at first. The orange peels tossed in the trash were not tragically slain when they were ground into the juicer. Their fate was sealed when the choice was made. Those choices didn't produce victims, but very calculated outcomes. They were deemed expendable resources, making them worth the sacrifice. Allowing the sale of semiautomatic weapons to private citizens is a choice with a very predictable result.

So, in the wake of yet another mass shooting that involved military-style rifles, let's take a moment to reconsider the choices that brought us here, the people responsible for the decisions, and most importantly, those sacrificed by those decisions. 

This subject is not merely "topical", but "evergreen". Mass shootings are now overlapping with funerals. Families and communities are being destroyed by AR-15 rifle rounds at a rate that reached the level of alarming twenty tragedies ago. Lawmakers seem to think that this is an acceptable trade-off. While most sane Americans would agree that this happens far too often, legislators are of a different opinion. They are in a position to react to this epidemic but believe the right for an eighteen-year-old to own a military-grade rifle is worth the lives sacrificed. And, when the senator from Texas says that we live in the "safest country" on the planet while Texans are providing DNA to be matched with slaughtered children, one has to wonder if there's a disconnect between the senator and his dwindling constituency. 

There are ways to reverse the trend. The vast majority of Americans support some form of background check for gun purchases. It may be the very least that we could expect from Washington, but all attempts have been stonewalled by the right. Gun shows need to be reconsidered as well. To rent the conference center at the local Super 8 so a collection of unlicensed "pharmacists" could sell a car-load of prescription meds from card tables is nuts. But guns?! No problem. And special interest money has to be eliminated. All this does is give us a running monetary total of what our political leaders feel lives are worth. 

Voting is where the change starts. Both at a state and federal level. Know who your representatives are, as well as where they stand on the issues. You may need to rearrange some priorities. You may need to vote for the gun-safety candidate, instead of the one promising a new sports arena. In other words, you may need to make a sacrifice to get change. But, the outcome will be so much better. 

We are extending the submission deadline for "Border Arts: Beyond the Barriers" to September 15. We have received great submissions but we can use more! We'd like to make this a comprehensive volume with various authors. Send us poetry, art, photography, and prose. Check out the flyer for all the details and share it with your fellow artists and writers. Let's put the border up high where it belongs. 

The Raving Press is looking for art and photography about the U.S./Mexico border by artists and photographers who currently reside along the border or have at one point lived either on the U.S. or Mexico side of the border. Submissions will be considered for inclusion in the upcoming anthology titled "Border Arts: Beyond the Barriers". 

All art and photography chosen for inclusion will be published in black and white. Only the cover art or photography will be in full color. Please indicate in your submission if you wish to have your work considered specifically for the cover. Otherwise, all submissions should be in black and white. 

The purpose of this anthology is to showcase the diversity of artistic talent flourishing all along the US/Mexico border despite all of the media hyperbole over immigration and on-going humanitarian crises. 

Don't miss this opportunity to be part of the voice that shapes the narrative. Help us paint the picture of the real border that we love and know better than any outsider. Submit your contribution today!

Send submissions to: theravingpress@gmail.com

This book will be more than a simple collection of art and literature to be put away on a dusty shelf, but a showcase of border artists where they will shine. This is the start of something big. Help us sound off to the world that we are here; that  we are shaping the world we want by creating the works inspired by this corner of the globe.  

Happy National Native American Heritage Day!
We celebrate the occasion today with the official book release of The Raving Press' Labios de Piedra/Lips of Stone: a collection of poems by Xánath Caraza in Spanish, accompanied by their English translations by Sandra Kingery. This is our first fully bilingual, single-author, poetry publication, and it is a good one!

More women and people of color's voices need to be elevated and amplified. This is the mission of The Raving Press. Help us achieve this goal by purchasing a copy of Labios de Piedra/Lips of Stone, or any other book in our list of publications. 

You can also help small, independent publishers like us serving minority communities by donating to our cause. 
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
 
The Raving Press to Publish their latest book, a collection of bilingual poetry by a single author in more than ten years.

The book will be available beginning on November 26, 2021, to coincide with National Native American Heritage Day.

Mission, Texas, USA – November 19, 2021 – The Raving Press, a Rio Grande Valley independent book publishing press, will be publishing their first book of poetry by a single author in more than ten years. For over a decade, the publisher has been focused on poetry and prose anthologies covering the societal topics of our times. This newest publication will be a departure from that focus on anthologies to feature a renowned author of poetry, Xanath Caraza. The new book is titled Labios de Piedra (Lips of Stone) and is a fully bilingual – Spanish and English – publication.

Caraza is described in her bio as “a traveler, educator, poet, short story writer, and translator.”  She writes for La Bloga, and Revista Literaria Monolito. Her various books have garnered recognition winning numerous awards, and they have been translated into English, Italian, Romanian, and Greek; and partially translated into Nahuatl, Portuguese, Hindi, and Turkish. 

The description for Labios de Piedra is summarized as follows:
“Author Xanath Caraza leads the reader on a highly visual archeological dig across the strata of time and history in this poetic tour through the ethos of Mexico's ‘mother culture’: the Olmec civilization.”

To coincide with the theme of Native American history of this book, the book release is scheduled for November 26, 2021, which is National Native American Heritage Day.

The book will be available on paperback online and through the publisher's website.

Visit https://www.theravingpress.com/labios-de-piedra.html to keep track of the countdown to the book’s North American release.

For information about the book or about the publisher, write to theravingpress@gmail.com.
 
About The Raving Press:
The Raving Press is an independent publisher from the Rio Grande Valley founded in 1998. The press is focused on finding talented authors of color from across the U.S. and beyond. The primary publishing output is focused on anthologies, but on rare occasions single-author manuscripts are also considered. The Raving Press is headquartered in Mission, Texas. For more information visit www.theravingpress.com

Review of Xanath Caraza's
"Corta la piel / It Pierces the Skin"
(FlowerSong Press, 2020 Translated by Sandra Kingery)
by Gabriel Hugo
 
Reading Xanath Caraza’s newest collection of poetry Corta la piel/It Pierces the Skin is an experience in something that is quickly becoming unusual in this fast world of disposable memes and social media video clips. It Pierces the Skin pierces the senses as Violeta, the protagonist of this almost novelistic narrative, describes images of death from the victim’s point of view just as easily and vividly as she does images of love and desire. The smell death should have is not something we think of very often. The closest most of us in the U.S. have been to awakening in a field of dead human bodies is through images of Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto,” a fictionalized account of brown people’s history in the Americas which fails to capture the full sense of death and dying because it never mentions the stench. Caraza is brilliant in bringing images of this and other scenes of blood, with and without the horror that can accompany them. In one poem, the blood can be the result of a violent assault by armed guerrillas upon innocent villagers in Central America, and in another, a paper cut upon the poet’s finger.
 
The work on which Caraza has embarked in this collection serves not only as a window into historical moments in the Americas and the world, but also as an instructional manual on how to write poetically. Poetry, the very word which inspires typical laypersons to roll our eyes into our skulls as we reach our hands at break-neck speed for a smart phone, a laptop, anything that could sooth our need for diversion if only for that very superficial moment, lest we be subjected to a heavy dousing of poetic and philosophical gasoline on the brain, which could lead to some kind of revelation or truth enveloping us as we blindly and deafly pass through this Earth.
 
Nonetheless, this aversion to the broad realm of poetry is not the fault of the poet or the layperson, but of society itself. Our teachers need to teach more from poetry books, as they teach from math books. Parents need to inculcate their children with the sensibilities of poets, for besides clergy, who among us is purest or more honest?  Poets advocate for the victims of oppression. Figures like Caraza depict for us the contradictions in our collective history, as in “The Sword,” a poem about Christopher Columbus and the violence he and the church unleashed through evangelism. We need to see this content dramatized for us in words in poetic stanzas, because no other vehicle manages to convey those images as powerfully as does the poet through the written word.
 
Among bilingual Spanish/English speakers as myself, a common utterance is that Spanish presents a better experience when reading poetry, because it just sounds much more romantic, profound, and dramatic when it needs to be. For the most part, in my experience, this has been the case. Yet, this general rule does not always hold true. Such was the case when I read “Falsa Alarma/False Alarm”, and the book’s namesake “Corta la Piel/It Pierces the Skin,” two of my favorite poems in this book. The entire collection was translated by Sandra Kingery and students at Lycoming College in Williamsport, PA. The translations themselves seemed to me not as the same poems merely interpreted in another language (translated from Spanish to English), but more like a continuation of the thought process, the inspiration stretched along, spread wider to encompass territory that constitutes a separate world with separate ideas, but clearly with similar sensibilities. At times throughout the pages, I felt that the English translation surpassed the original not in skill or depth, but in magnitude and urgency.
 
Caraza’s poetry is emotive, powerful, and transcendental in its tone and content. Corta la piel/It Pierces the Skin is a collection worthy of collecting and passing along to the next generation. It not only shows the pictures of our current and past world history interlaced with matters of the heart and urges of the human body, but also teaches an art form that seems to be on the brink of being forgotten. Thanks to Xanath Caraza, forgetting the power of poetry we will not.

 El Pasado 1º de Octubre ofreció un programa virtual dedicado   al escritor, Roberto De la Torre Hurtado en memoria de recordar su obra literaria.
“Roberto fue un maestro de la palabra, orador por excelencia, tenía la habilidad de cautivar públicos de todas las edades. Atrapaba con su narrativa, poesía y su gran sentido del humor. El  don de gente que lo caracterizaba lo hacía destacar entre los grupos,  si tenías una inquietud enfocada a lo social o querías realizar un evento,  él estaba dispuesto a colaborar contigo”.  R.L.S.
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 Fundador del Encuentro de escritores “Voces en la Frontera”, llegando a celebrar el XV aniversario en el 2019.  Autor de los títulos, “El Vampiro del Río Grande”, Antología “Mundos Extraños”, “Vuelo de dos Lunas” y un “El llanto de los murciélagos”.
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Dentro del programa virtual que se llevó a cabo en el día anteriormente mencionado.  Las voces  de autores y artistas de Estados Unidos y México se hicieron una sola, para llevar  poesía y arte hasta el cielo. Dando lectura a  poemas y cuentos cuya  autoría era del escritor homenajeado, así como  de la creación literaria de los autores invitados.

Monday, February 10, 2020
From the TRiP Wire Opinion Desk
(TRiP Wire welcomes readers to submit opinion pieces for publication)

    A funny thing happened today when I went looking up the phrase "The Emperor has no clothes". The search (which was totally unrelated to writing of this article) led me to this website in the picture above (I'll include the link at the bottom of this piece).  It was funny because, as you can see, the meaning refers to people being "afraid to criticize something or someone because the perceived wisdom of the masses is that the thing or person is good or important."

Jeanine Cummins' book, "American Dirt" is very likely not the 'Masterful" work of literature that Sandra Cisneros claims it is. But because of all the online criticism and media  frenzy about the book, it's now a New York Time's Best Seller, and it's #1 this week on the Amazon Charts. Nice job, activists. You made sure this silly little book made it huge when, on its own, it probably would barely have caused a ripple in the literary world. (In other words, this book has no clothes...or a jacket...like the emperor in the phrase above...)

And a whole lot of people are going to benefit from this. A lot of people that you probably didn't want to benefit. Like Cummins, the publisher of the book, and Cisneros, herself. I mean, she stuck to her guns on this. Backing the book 1000% despite all the fuss from Mexican Americans and other Latinos condemning it.

I heard an interview she did on NPR where she sounded so combative, that I thought, damn is this because she refuses to acknowledge an error in judgement on her part? Or is she positioning herself for some future purpose, some kind of gain. Very Machiavellian, Sandra. Nice. 

​I mean, she even went all passive-aggressive about the Latino critics, essentially saying that they should shut up and read the book, and "if you don't like it" do some introspection about what you are "really upset about" and write poetry. Write POETRY!? (Scratching my head...) Sounded to me like that was meant as a kick in the baby-making area of all the activists out there, who I guess in her mind, tend to be poets who are angry about a whole lot of things that have nothing to do with their oppressors. The publisher of the book will definitely keep this little Mexican American token girl in their pile of AFFIRMATIVE ACTION BOOK DEALS. Fo' sho'.  Bravo, Sandra!

Full disclosure, I have not read the book. I tried, but I couldn't get past the first chapter. It's boring a.f. I don't know how Oprah said she was mesmerized from the first word her eyeballs fell on when she opened the book. What kind of trash have you been reading, girl? To hear her say it, it was the most captivating, enthralling story that she just couldn't put down. 

Really? It was that good, Oprah? Or were you saying that because you have some deal, some bargain to live up to with the publishers and their industry. After all, you are running an empire, so I get it. It's business, baby. Truly. I'm not being facetious. Business is business. But maybe I see now why some folks on the brown side of the scale saw this reception and said, wait a minute. Something smells fishy a.f. And it's not the stink-filled shirt on my wet back, you know, since I just swam across the slimy Rio Grande River from Mejico. 

I'll be honest (to my fellow brownies' scorn) I didn't buy into that whole story of appropriation and cultural insensitivity...at first. But then I read (tried really hard--forced myself to complete) the first chapter.  Only then was I able to see their point. Not because of the appropriation argument, but because of the "really BAD writing" criticism of the book. It's just some cheesy writing. This is both a good and a bad thing. Good because it gives hope to many wannabe bestsellers to write without worrying about being great at it, and bad because it only reinforces the critics' argument against the book. 

I think I have digressed a bit.

The point is this, the major publishers are not interested in hearing real stories of Mexican and Latino immigrants by Mexican and Latino immigrants. In that sense, Cisneros had a point in her interview, saying that Cummins could probably reach an audience (White people) that neither she, nor other authors of color can. Why? I guess because Cummins is mostly White. (She has about a plantain-peel's worth of Puerto Rican in her blood, as I understand).

BUUUT. If these a-holes in the major leagues of the publishing industry would give us a chance, give us a 7 figure book deal, we'd write kick-ass books that would take us 7 years to accomplish. 7 figures pays for barbecues and cerveza for 7 years easy! (Yes, I'm including myself here. I'm author... duuuh, I no' how to writ good-o.) 

I guess what I'm saying is, yes the publishers still haven't opened the door to us. God knows we have been banging on their doors, and walls, and windows hard as hell for decades. They just keep ignoring us like we're Jehovah's Witnesses knocking on a Saturday morning. But one person who sure is going to have some sweet deals coming out of this is Sandra Cisneros for defending the book to the cost of many of her audience walking out on her. But perhaps it is a master strategy to finally break into the White reader zone and become bankable to the major publishers, who in turn, will give her a nice multiple-figure deal. Maybe she's not the hero we wanted, but the one we deserve...?

Ps. BTW, here's my book. Put your money where your activism is. Support a colored's writing career. I bet you a 7-figure book deal that my book right here opens in a much more dramatic fashion and grabs you much better than American Dirt. Just an unbiased opinion. ;) 

Link to Bookbrowse.
​Link to Sandra Cisnero's NPR interview.
Ah, what the hell, link to American Dirt.