Photo by Marlis Momber From L to R center row: Piri Thomas, Amiri Baraka Amina Baraka, Allen Ginsberg Miguel Algarín, Nancy Mercado, Donald Lev Second row: Taylor Meade, Bob Holman Mikhail Horowitz and in front: Pedro Pietri The Village Gate, New York City
Presentation of the American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement
Praise for Nancy's Work
"Beautiful poetry flows. An artist, a poet born of the body and soul, of the people, of children of all colors. She knows what pain is and raises above it. A teacher of teachers, Nancy Mercado has learned that words can be bullets or butterflies, that one has to say what one means and mean what one says."
—Piri Thomas, author of Down These Mean Streets
“Nancy Mercado is a NuyoCosmoRican who refused to let poetry off the hook in her memory journey through the oral tradition of secret public self soul searching down to earth extraterrestrial original mad sane expressions heard on the street of a mind that went through college and survived to write about it in poems that keep changing all the time, proving that the future is the only begotten bilingual shadow of the past. Read her book if you don’t believe it!”
—Rev. Pedro Pietri, author of Puerto Rican Obituary
If the personal is political, then such verses as “He was forgotten/ before he could be remembered/ by the heads of state/ he provided sugar for” written about her grandfather, “Don Portolo…Director of the Sugar Cane Field Workers” and “Milla can speak of/ The turn of the century land reforms, / Of the blinded enthusiasm/ For a man called Marin…” about her grandmother, “Milla,” and “Juanita…Providing food from soil, / Creating homes from ashes, / Teaching tolerance by living” about her aunt in Puerto Rico, offer testimony to the power of this type of poetic vision.
"In her concluding essay to the collection ¿What's in a Nombre? Nancy Mercado states, ‘Naming is the spiritual act of living beyond the moment, of signifying something beyond the instant ….' [The] author reclaims the right to name herself and her work apart from the prevailing hegemony of gender and/or culture."
