Ep. 123: Immigration, Poetry, and Motherhood with Ananda Lima

Talking Beats with Daniel Lelchuk

"In poetry there's so much flexibility to see how things come together to form one poem in the end."

Poet and writer Ananda Lima is here, discussing her new poetry compilation Mother/Land. With words and phrases in her native language Portuguese mixed in with the English text, it’s a unique work from a linguistic point of view. In the poems, many themes of immigration, violence, and motherhood are discussed — but what are this artist’s views of her adopted home country, America? Lima has many varied views of the country that gave her illustrious degrees and publications. What isn’t sitting right? What is the promise and allure of America— and is it not resonating with some people who come here seeking to better their lives?

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Ananda Lima is the author of Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), winner of the Hudson Prize, shortlisted for the Chicago Review of Books Chriby Awards. She is also the author of four chapbooks: Vigil (Get Fresh Books, 2021), Tropicália(Newfound, 2021, winner of the Newfound Prose Prize), Amblyopia (Bull City Press, 2020), and Translation (Paper Nautilus, 2019, winner of the Vella Chapbook Prize). Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She has served as the poetry judge for the AWP Kurt Brown Prize, as staff at the Sewanee Writers Conference, and as a mentor at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Immigrant Artist Program. She has been awarded the inaugural Work-In-Progress Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers, for her fiction manuscript-in-progress. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark.