Daring to thrive
Marta believes her readers will be able to have a sensory understanding of voices not often represented in literature. She hopes to expand the reader's capacity for love of "the other," especially during these abhorrent political waves of hate, violence, and division.
Marta's writing is grounded in place, identities, and sexuality. Highlighting the courage and wisdom of those who dare to thrive at the margins.
Cradled by Skeletons
A Life in Poems and Essays is a raw expression of identity and place. This memoir relates Marta Miranda-Straub’s experience of trauma, resilience, and transformation.
In all her many languages and through these prayers and sermons masquerading, as poems, Marta straps her wings around visions of domestic violence, the addict, and each and every broken one of us, seeing only familia in the faces of the dispossessed.
In well crafter and big-hearted poems like Addiction, Social Justice Prayer, and How to Eat a Pomegranate, she shows us what it means to leave this place better than the way you found it, to love without restrictions, to joke about every injustice to each other in mere words alone.
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Thank the ancestors for gifting us a poet teacher who would spit in the master’s soup to save all of us. We survived a past ruled by everything straight, white, and male. Marta has left us with evidence that the future is indeed female, dark, and queer.
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- Frank X Walker, Former Kentucky Poet Laureate
Lullaby For Maddie
In Lullaby for Maddie, Marta Miranda-Straub sings in English and Spanish about a young mermaid born into the sun-kissed love of a close-knit family. As we learn her story, we learn who she is, and that love is like water and also like arms that “surround us and hug us and hold us up.” --Jeremy Paden, author and co-translator of Under the Ocelot Sun / Bajo el sol del ocelote
