Tia Chucha Press started twenty-five years ago in Chicago with the publication of Luis J. Rodriguez’s first book, Poems Across the Pavement. As founder/editor of the Press, Rodriguez has since published more than fifty poetry collections of quality crosscultural U.S. poets, as well as anthologies, chapbooks, and a CD. Tia Chucha Press is now a project of Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural &amp; Bookstore in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles, which Rodriguez helped create in 2001 with his wife Trini. We are honored to announce the 25th Anniversary Edition of Poems Across the Pavement—close to twenty poems of an emerging poet that began a prolific writing career.

Poems across the Pavement

Literature & Fiction

Rodríguez, Luis J.

Poetry

Tia Chucha

"Marvin Tate's Schoolyard of Broken Dreams reaches out, punches, grabs, wrestles to the ground, rises and stomps in an original manner. His is a voice in contemporary poetry which dares to pry from beneath the concrete places over it by history and sing." --Sterling D. Plumpp, author of Blues Narrative

Schoolyard of Broken Dreams

Tate, Marvin

Rooted in the social activism of Vatican II, the civil rights and anti-war movements of the sixties, the poetry of John Sheehan is filled with keen observations of place, people and time, where steel mills and sand dunes intersect with schoolchildren, overhead remarks, blues and jazz, where pumpkins sit beneath TV sets blaring the evening news. Leaving Gary confronts issues of race and class, religion and landscape, memory and media, chronicling places which changed and places we wish would change.

Leaving Gary

Sheehan, John

Black male/female relationships, and women and their significant place in the life of poet Afaa M. Weaver, make up the terrain of Talisman. The poems in this collection attempt to understand and recover the love that was there and which will always remain in the spiritual sense, long after the doors have slammed shut.

Talisman

Weaver, Afaa M.

Poetry. African American Studies. "Reading theses poems, you'll think the stereo is on--their music is that sure and rich, exuberant and sorrowful in turns, full of a sexual sway. Terrance Hayes takes us through a living library of cultural icons, from Shaft and Fat Albert to Coltrane and Miles Davis, but we always end up at the heart, where damage and tenderness mix, where lonliness becomes a blood tie. His generous vision finds beauty in our most flawed gestures"--Betsy Sholl, author of THE RED LINE and DON'T EXPLAIN. Terrance Hayes is a native of South Carolina. He received his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997 and has published in a range of literary journals and anthologies. MUSCULAR MUSIC is his first book.

Muscular Music

Hayes, Terrance

Sometimes in our culture it seems that poetry has become tiny. It should be huge. It should be the whale that swallows the world and gives it back to us transformed. Susan Anderson's work shapes passion on the page, utilizing a variety of personas, delving into the past of a person or a place, taking sides, making an argument. She's keenly attuned to the eloquence of the voiceless, portraying the spiritual resourcefulness of the people whose culture she was not only born into, but chose to embrace.            The stories of ordinary life are the substance of history; the passage of events is reflected in daily intimacies. Through these intricacies, African Americans have provided their gifts to the world. Susan Anderson's poetry strives to contain some bits of their music and history, justice and love, which is woven into every corner of America, and so the world.

Nostalgia for a Trumpet: Poems of Memory and History

Anderson, Susan D.

Simultaneously clear yet mythically transcendent, the poems in Heart’s Migration speak power in a woman’s voice. Rodriguez unmasks the human heart in its many beguiling and compelling forms: passion, oppression, and liberation. She evokes and re-imagines classical, biblical, Cherokee, Latino, and other American themes in strikingly personal and sometimes humorous ways as she lovingly renders the heart’s eternal encounter with joy and loss.

Heart's Migration

Rodriguez, Linda

Prison writing has a long and illustrious history in the United Stateshome of the modern correctional system. In the first decade of the 21st century, this country also garnered the distinction of having more prisoners per capita than any other nation in the world. We need to hear from the incarcerated writings of incarcerated men and women. The largest state prison system is in California with some 175,000 people behind bars in close to 35 facilities. Yet the only approved Honor Yard in the Department of Corrections is at the California State Prison, Los Angeles County, in Lancaster, CA. These are the men that despite often-horrendous crimesmany are lifers, with a few going on three decadeshave proven their capacity to dream, to create, to write, to change. From poems, to stories, to novel excerpts, to reportage, to personal essaysand a few drawingsHonor Comes Hard” depicts what can happen to people who are given, as Clarence Darrow expressed many years ago, a chance to live.” The work is drawn from writing classes that Lucinda Thomas helped organize in the Honor Yard over several years, and from workshops conducted by Luis J. Rodriguez on most Sundays, for eight hours a day, through eight months in 2007-2008.

Honor Comes Hard: Writings from California Prison System's Honor Yard

United States

“When I first started working on ‘The Flood,’ the title piece from this collection of poems, I thought it was about the World, about Politics, about Race, about all the things that begin with capital letters that make up Life. And in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina came and left such destruction, opening up old social wounds and sins in the process, I thought this was my chance to be big, to be grand, to tackle the important subjects that important artists are seemingly never afraid of. I was going to make my statement. I was going to be heard. I was going to leave my mark.” With this statement, Chiwan Cho begins to describe the impulses behind this most promising and powerful collection of poetry. His voice gives his poems a deep level of intimacy, while his economy of language distinguishes his work as authentic and accessible. This collection is a journey to discover the poet, Chiwan, as a man, as a Korean, as a son, as a husband, as a writer. He embraces the smallest moments in his life―finding key details, examining them, breaking them down and rebuilding them, to see if, somewhere in the smallest fragments, both trivial and tragic, the poet can discover himself, reflected, resonating with his father teaching him how to survive. Chiwan says that in the process of writing the poems in “The Flood,” he often repeated to myself Ezra Pound’s Canto 117, the line “That I have lost my center/fighting the world.” By the time Chiwan polished each line in each poem, he’d found that center again, even if it was for a fleeting moment. “Over eight years after I wrote the first words of this poem I thought I’d never finish, I found what I had lost. My core. My heart,” Chiwan says. “It was never about wars and tyrants and poverty nor about any of the Isms that want to suffocate us each and every day. I realized how far off the track I’d gone without realizing it.”

The Flood

Chiwan Choi

The Northeast San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles is the second largest community of Mexicans and Central Americans in the United States with 500,000 people. Yet, until 2001 the Northeast Valley had no trade bookstores, movie houses, art galleries, or decent cultural spaces. That year Tia Chucha?s Centro Cultural opened its doors, first as a cultural café, which in ten years has provided workshops in music, visual arts, dance, theater, writing, and indigenous cosmology?along with an art gallery, a poetry press, a youth empowerment project, and the only annual outdoor literacy and performance festival in the area, ?Celebrating Words: Written, Performed &amp; Sung.? Rushing Waters, Rising Dreams borrows its name from the name of one of its communities Pacoima, a Native American word meaning ?rushing waters.? Interviews with artists, community leaders, politicians, and well-known personalities essays, research, photos, art pieces, poetry, and cultural tableau, expl

Rushing Waters, Rising Dreams: How the Arts Are Transforming a Community

History & Criticism

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Books by Tia Chucha