M. Miriam Herrera

M. Miriam Herrera is an American author and poet. Her occupation is at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley as she currently teaches Intro to Mexican Studies as well as Composition and Rhetoric and Creative Writing. She also is a Lecturer II with the Writing Language Studies on campus. Her poetry often explores Mexican American or Chicano life and her Crypto-Jewish and Native American (Cherokee) heritage, but mainly the universal themes of nature, family, myth, and the transcendent experience. Herrera was born to natives of the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. She was born in Sutherland, Nebraska, where her parents had been working in the sugar-beet fields. She was raised in Aurora, Illinois, where her parents moved to escape a migratory life of farm work.

Herrera's literary influences include Theodore Roethke, Gwendolyn Brooks, Gary Soto, Lucille Clifton, Flannery O'Conner, and Pablo Neruda. Herrera began writing poetry as a grade school student when she met Gwendolyn Brooks, former Poet Laureate of Illinois, when Brooks read her poetry at Herrera's elementary school.

Herrera attended the University of Illinois Program For Writers and earned her Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing in 1981. She studied with John Frederic Nims, the editor of Poetry Magazine; Ralph J. Mills, editor of The Selected Letters of Theodore Roethke and The Notebooks of David Ignatow; and Paul Carroll, founder of the Poetry Center of Chicago and of Big Table Magazine. While attending the University of Illinois at Chicago, Herrera was involved in the Chicano literary community, which included Sandra Cisneros, Carlos Cumpian, Norma Alarcón, Ana Castillo, and Ralph Cintron, et al., as her contemporaries.

Herrera taught Creative Writing, Poetry Writing, Chicano/Latino Literature, and Expository Writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago; the University of New Mexico, Los Alamos; South Bay College, Hawthorne, California; and Russell Sage College, Troy, NY. She is a member of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, CA, and is the founder of the Writing Studio, Medusa Community of Poets & Writers, and the Audre Lorde Poetry Prize at Russell Sage College.

Herrera descends from Crypto-Jews or Conversos. These converts to Catholicism escaped the Spanish Inquisition for the New World where they intermarried with the indigenous peoples and old Christians who populated the American Southwest. Her poetry collection, Kaddish for Columbus explores the enigma of these divergent identities and landscapes the poet inhabits:

"Mythic borders appear in the poems as a metaphor for life that are found beyond physical space—the borders between peoples, ideas, religions, landscapes; between science and spirit, between self; how identities are transformed when one side collides with another; how the poet, a descendant of both Columbus and Native Americans, reconciles ambiguity." [1]

M. Miriam Herrera has been published in many articles and here i show the requirement of each of the places that were able to support the quality of her work. Southwestern American Literature is a scholarly journal that includes literary criticism, fiction, poetry, and book. It published premier works by and about some of the most significant writers of the region. NMW's you summit in an anonymous way, so there could be fairness and equality at the time of judging they don't penalize people because of there Grammarly error, Earth's Daughters is women support for literary arts periodical, publish works fro all over the united state. Albatross, they publish mostly poetry written in free verse and narrative style. They don't take rhyming poetry, haiku, or prose poetry. ArtLife Gallery offers exclusively curated works from a wide array of internationally renowned and emerging Artists, Photographers, and Sculptors also secondary works from people like Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Banksy and more. Blue Mesa accepts previously unpublished work in Fiction, nonfiction with the rule of 6000 words, Poetry, and Visual Art. They are looking for unique work, strong voices, and lively, compelling narrative with a fine eye for craft. Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry’s there mission is to discover, develop, and promote new writing. They look for original work from such renowned writers as Michael Blumenthal, Pablo Neruda, William Stafford, Mark Strand ad many others.