Back Porch readers: Susan Sherman & Demetria Martinez - September 10, 2025

Writer, poet and immigrant rights activist, Demetria Martinez was born and raised in Albuquerque. She earned a BA from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs from Princeton University. Her poetry collections include The Devil’s Workshop (2002), Breathing Between The Lines (1997), and Turning (1987), which appeared in an anthology of three Chicana poets. She is the author of the novella, The Block Captain’s Daughter, a recipient of the 2013 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and the widely translated novel, Mother Tongue (1994) which won a Western States Book Award. The novel was inspired by her 1988 indictment on charges of conspiring to smuggle Central American refugees into the United States. A reporter for the National Catholic Reporter, she was later acquitted on First Amendment grounds. In 2013 she coauthored an ebook with former Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris, These People Want to Work: Immigration Reform. Her essay collection, Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana (2005) won an International Latino Book Award. She has been a recipient of the Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature. With Rosalee Montoya-Read, she coauthored Grandpa’s Magic Tortilla (2010), which won a New Mexico Book Awards’ Young Readers Book Award. In 2024, her translations of her grandfather’s corridos—which she worked on with Mexican poet Hector Contreras—appeared in the Southwest Historical Review. In the fall of 2025, Poetry in Dangerous Times: Two Women, Two Worlds—a book of poetry and prose, coauthored with Susan Sherman—will be released and published by Casa Urraca Press.  Martinez lives with her wife in La Cienega, New Mexico.

Susan Sherman was a virtual guest with Jules’ Poetry Playhouse reading series featuring poets from IKON Magazine. We are pleased to have her in-person at this special event. Poet, playwright, and a founding editor of IKON magazine, Susan Sherman has published four collections of poetry; a poetry, essay and short fiction collection, The Color of the Heart, Writing from Struggle and Change (Curbstone, 1990) and a memoir, America’s Child: A Woman’s Journey through the Radical Sixties (Curbstone Press, 2007.) She has had twelve plays produced off-off Broadway. Her translation of Shango de Ima (Doubleday) won eleven AUDELCO awards for the Nuyorican Poets Cafe production in 1996. Among her many awards are a NYFA fellowship for creative nonfiction, a NYFA Fellowship in poetry and a Puffin Foundation Grant. Her book, The Light that Puts an End to Dreams ( Wings Press, 2012) with an introduction by Margaret Randall and photographs by Joséphine Sacabo, is an autobiography told in poems and prose poems. Capturing more than an individual life, it is the inner life of a generation. A mixture of intense political poems, intimate love poems and provocative reflections, The Light that Puts an End to Dreams documents the journey of a woman intimately involved with many of the most important events of our time.