Any literary/visual arts journal rests on the creative diversity and the richness of thoughts and themes of its contributors. Inclusiveness enables aaduna to attract a wide range of emerging poets, writers and visual artists, as well as established creatives who are seeking to broaden or develop a different thematic pathway for their work.
With a return to a scheduled publication platform in 2024, the December 2023 issue will harken the “re-arrival” of an on-line journal that published its inaugural issue in February 2011.
It has been a decades-old aaduna practice to introduce contributors before the issue containing their work is released. With that aura of tradition, we are pleased to present
Ámate Cecilia Pérez
Ámate Cecilia Pérez, a race equity consultant is the founder of Decolonizing Race and the Latinx Racial Equity Project. With a life purpose to end racism and oppression, she supports individuals and groups to healing from oppression, increase transformational leadership skills, and build equity by shifting organizational culture and systems. Prior to her social justice experience, Ámate worked as a print and radio journalist with several publications to her credit. One of her personal essays, “Dust Angels,” was published in The Wandering Song, an anthology of Central American writers living in the United States. Ms. Pérez is a Kellogg Foundation National Race Equity and Healing Fellow as well as a Radical Hope grant receipt for innovation in race and healing.
Ms. Pérez and her family fled the Salvadoran civil war in the early 1980s. She grew up as undocumented child in Los Angeles and benefited from the 1986 immigration reform law. She has a B.A. from UCSD and a master’s degree in journalism from UCB. She now lives in Inverness, CA on unseeded and occupied Coast Miwok and Tamal Indian territory.
The forthcoming issue of aaduna will feature her story, “Kiss and Don’t Tell” a riveting story that will grip and hold you in its sublime power as well as more of her bio information.
Here are the opening sentences to “Kiss…”
I almost vomited after my first kiss. The boy was three years older than me and in high school, but came to my junior high school dance in 1982. Cool Latino boys were either Cholos or rockabillies. The Stray Cats were popular then and when their song “Rock this Town” came on over the speakers, everyone jumped to the dance floor.
Intrigued?
Read the full story in late December 2023.
An online adventure with words and images…
~ a globally read, multi-cultural, and diverse literary and visual arts journal established in 2010.
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