NANCY MERCADO
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Recognition & Reviews


Morningside Area Alliance New York City, "Tar Baby Launches a Bold New Journal of Art, Politics and Radical Imagination." 2025

The Collidescope, "Super Bowl Insurrection: A Conversation with Ishmael Reed," 2022

Diario de Pontevedra, España. "Poesía en español, gallego y vasco emociona Nueva York." 2021
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Jacket 2, "Idolos Among Us:
The innovative aesthetics of contemporary US Latinx poets." Antonio Lopez, 2020

The Guardian Newspaper, "The Frederick Douglass 200: On the occasion of his bicentennial, a list of 200 people who best embody the spirit and work of Frederick Douglass, one of the most influential figures in history." 2019

Binghamton University, Bing U News, "Mercado Honored for Lifetime Literary Achievement." 2018

SymRutgers Magazine, "The Honor of a Lifetime, Alumna Nancy Mercado receives the 2017 American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement." Winter, 2018

The Before Columbus Foundation, "2017 American Book Awards announced!" August 4, 2017

Alumna Wins American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement: Rutgers Today, 2017

San Francisco Chronicle, "Gyasi wins book award for diversity," AP, August 6, 2017
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Washington Times, "Debut novelist among winners of the American Book Awards," AP, August 4, 2017

New York Times, "Cure the Canon of Literary Agoraphobia," Ishmael Reed, August 2015

American Clave, "Naked Voice, Magnetic Echo," Piri Thomas, 2013

Nancy Mercado Set to Guest Edit plati'tude's Groundbreaking Latin@ Issue for Winter, 2012

A History of American Literature, Second Edition, Richard Gray, 2012

After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11, Richard Gray, 2011

Transcultural Graffiti: Diasportic Writing and the Teaching of Literary Studies, Russell West-Pavlov, 2005

Writing the Disaster: New York Poets on 9/11, Russell West-Pavlov, 2005

The Nation, "Book Reviewing African-American Style," Wanda Coleman, 2002

A Gathering of the Tribes Magazine, "Book Review: The Balance of Understanding," Paul Skiff, 2002

The World Haiku Review, "Dialogue with a Poet Michael Mcclintock," Susumu Takiguchi, 2002

G A R E MARITIME, "It's Never too Late: A Brief Introduction to the Poetry of Nancy Mercado," ​Dan Shot, 2000

Picture
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. 

--Marilyn Kiss, PhD., for the
​Encyclopedia of Hispanic-American Literature


"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."

--Judith Mercado, Blog

Interviews

Chelsea Community News, "Art in the Aftermath," Puma Perl, 2025

MMN Network, "The Art Settlers of New York | Nuyorican Literature," Rafaela Ronnie Billini, 2023

National Public Radio, "All of it with Allison Stewart," 2021

​The Village Voice, "An Oral History of Miguel Algarin's Spoken Word." Susan L. Hornik, 2021

The Village Voice, "Miguel Algarin's High Art of the Roaches and the Tenements," Susan L. Horn, 2021

​EntreTemas: Conozcamos a nuestras autoras II: Nancy Mercado (Spanish language video), Juana M. Ramos, 2021

​Teatro LATEA Tertulia: Tertulia with Miguel Trelles and Nancy Mercado, 2020

​Nancy Mercado: The Passion of Nuyorican Poetry:
Blues.Gr,
Michael Limnios, 2019
​
De Noche en New York Interview: Emisora Sol Latina
​(Spanish language radio), Wilfred Serrano, 2015


PBS NewsHour Interview, Jeffrey Brown, 2011

Copyright © 2015 - 2025 Nancy Mercado
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