"I grew up in Queens, New York, where immigrants speak 800+ languages, including Garifuna, an Arawakan language nearly extinguished by the British in the late 1700s. Some of my neighbors are from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador––places from which thousands have fled for safety and been met instead with brutality. Beyond triumphant diversity narratives, language and migration reveal the connection between past and present, here and there, us and them. Poetry, like all diasporic languages, is a singular record of human hybridity, migration and war of Gramscian accuracy, capturing not only a language, but all its interstices and flyways. It is in this language that Asian American poetry speaks." –– Alison Roh Park

This month, Kundiman has created a Poetry & Democracy Action Calendar for the Poetry Coalition's March programming. We've enlisted 4 curators to create folios of material for each week. This week, Alison Roh Park takes us through Immigration, giving us an intimate introduction, curating a folio of poems, and providing writing prompts and direct action items. See the whole week here! Read more about our Poetry Coalition project on our website.