Born in a Puerto Rican rainforest, to radical parents who were both scientists and artists, in ahouse full of book, I began writing poetry and stories as soon as I could write. We moved to Chicago when I was thirteen. I wrote throughout my teens and co-produced a feminist radio show at sixteen, in 1970. My first publications were in the late 1970s. My writing has always been part of the social justice movements of my time. In 1981 I was a contributor to This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, followed by publication in many other anthologies.
Getting Home Alive, a mixed genre book written with my mother, Rosario Morales, appeared in 1986. In attened Union Institute and earned a doctorate in Women's Studies, with a prose poetry feminist retelling of Atlantic world history through the lives of Puerto Rican women and a collection of essays on memroy, trauma and healing. These appeared in 1998 as Remedios and Medicine Stories in 1998. A new, greatly expanded edition of Medicine Stories was published in 2019. I also self-published three books under the imprint of Palabrera Press: Kindling: Writings on the Body (2013), Cosecha and Other Stories, again with my mother, after her death (2014), and Silt: Prose Poems (2019). Kindling is widely used as a text on disability justice. Silt traces natural and social connections between the Mississippi River and the Caribbean. I am currently directingRimonim Liturgy Project, a poetic residency with fifteen Jewish organizations to create new liturgy centering Jews of Color and Indigenous Jews.
I have spent important writing time at Hedgebrook, a women's writing retreat on Whidby Island in the Puget Sound, Norcroft, a women's writing retreat formerly on the North Shore of Lake Superior, and twice at A Studio in the Woods in New Orleans.
While I enjoy writing essays, fiction and poetry, my favorite genre is prose poetry/poetic prose. I deeply enjoy transforming historical and scientific research into prose poetry, and my work continues to be about social transformation, now more urgent than ever before in human history. In December, 2019 I returned to rural Puerto Rico, to live on the land where I grew up.
