M. Soledad Caballero
I Was A Bell
available now from Red Hen Press
“A triumph, a gutting cry of love and longing for all that migration sows and uproots in the survivors of exile. In retracing her family’s story of leaving a Chile under Pinochet to 1980s Oklahoma, Soledad Caballero gives soaring voice to the ways history, memory, and the collective weight of our disappeared live silenced, but never unheard, in our bodies and hearts. It’s hard to express how much these poems made unnamed parts of me feel seen.”
– Natalia Sylvester, author of Everyone Knows You Go Home
and Chasing the Sun
“Caballero bears unflinching witness to the emotional trauma inherited from war-ravaged Chile to the exiled plains of Oklahoma. As though to witness is to love. These poems negotiate the transitions of language, memory, country, her battle with cancer, counterbalancing the violence from which she fled, with a transformative devotion to details.”
– Richard Blanco, Presidential Inaugural Poet
AWARDS
2022 Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award
One Author – English
International Latino Book Awards
2022 Outstanding Book
International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry
2022 Benjamin Franklin Award Silver Winner
Independent Book Publishers Association
2019 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award Winner
Chosen by Allison Joseph
- from Red Hen Press -
M. Soledad Caballero is a professor of English at Allegheny College. Her scholarly work focuses on British Romanticism, travel writing, postcolonial literatures, WGSS, and interdisciplinarity. She is a CantoMundo fellow, has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, has been a finalist for the Missouri Review’s Jeffry E. Smith Editors’ Prize in poetry, the Mississippi Review’s annual Editors’ prize, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, and the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize. Her poem “Myths We Tell” won the 2019 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize for Cutthroat: a Journal of the Arts. She is a co-recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Connections Grant, as well as a Great Lakes Colleges Association Expanding Collaborations Initiative Grant.