This documentary short chronicles the first time a film has been translated and dubbed into Maya-Ixil, the native language of one of the Guatemalan indigenous groups that were targeted by State-sponsored genocide in 1982-83. Told from the perspective of Matilde Terraza, a young emerging leader from the Ixil community and the coordinator of the translation project, the film brings to light the ongoing work to preserve collective memory in Guatemala,...

Mother Tongue begins with a shocking discovery. In a powerful fiction that reads like a true story, the details of the crime and its aftermath unfold. In mid-life, Australian fiction-writer Nella Pine learns that she was kidnapped as an infant from a hospital in the United States, taken to Australia, and raised there by the woman she knew as her mother, but who was actually her abductor. "When I was three days old, a nurse named Ruth Miller stole...

In 1988, poet, journalist and activist Demetria Martinez was indicted on charges of conspiracy for helping Salvadorans escape their country. After she was acquitted, she began writing Mother Tongue. The result is the powerful story of a young woman's efforts to help a people who were routinely "disappeared" by their government. A nameless El Salvadoran man, fleeing torture and imprisonment, arrives in the United States-his only hope for asylum. The...

A probing and poetic examination of language, food, faith, and family attachment in Italian life through the eyes of an American who moved to Parma with her husband and family. In the 1980s, the American writer Wallis Wilde-Menozzi moved permanently with her Italian husband and her daughter to Parma, a sophisticated city in northern Italy, where he became a professor of biology. Her search for rootedness in the city that was to be her home introduced...

"An enlightening linguistic journey through a thousand years of feminist language--and what we can learn from the vivid vocabulary that English once had for women's bodies, experiences, and sexuality. So many of the words that we use to chronicle women's lives feel awkward or alien. Medical terms are scrupulously accurate but antiseptic. Slang and obscenities have shock value, yet they perpetuate taboos. Where are the plain, honest words for women's...

After getting his Master's degree in the US, and because he can't get a job, and because all he wants to do all day is sit at his Play Station, Enrique Márquez Pino, a middleclass Bogotan, is forced to return to his home country, where he is to live with his father. Enrique believes that nothing is unattainable for a young, smart and hard-working Colombian (poor idiot). Nothing gets too nice for him in Bogotá, but at least he gets the chance to...

American Academy of Poets award-winning poet-translator Peter Hargitai considers the raging, aging child in this highly original collection of poems. His earlier work was listed in Yale critic Harold Bloom's prestigious The Western Canon.

A searing novel of immigration, judgement and sacrifice and the powerful bonds forged in the crucible of refugee camp life from an internationally-acclaimed writer, Silence is My Mother Tongue dissects society's ability to wage war on its own women and explores the stories we must tell to survive in a broken, inhospitable environment. "On a hill overlooking a refugee camp in Sudan, a young man strings up bedsheets that, in an act of imaginative resilience,...

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview: #1 The first silk merchants were Chinese merchants, who would pull a colorful swatch of silk from a pouch and show it to the lady of the house. The gods themselves could not resist: Isis was said to have draped herself in fine silk yielding diverse colors. #2 The Romans knew about Chinese silk, but they did not know China. They believed that silk grew directly on the...