**A Time Must-Read Book of 2024An impassioned homage to the divas who shake up our world and transform it with their bold, dazzling artistry.**What does it mean to be a “diva”? A shifting, increasingly loaded term, it has been used to both deride and celebrate charismatic and unapologetically fierce performers like Aretha Franklin, Divine, and the women of Labelle. In this brilliant, powerful blend of incisive criticism and electric memoir, Deborah Paredez—scholar,...

An outpouring of memorial tributes and public expressions of grief followed the death of the Tejana recording artist Selena Quintanilla Pérez in 1995. The Latina superstar was remembered and mourned in documentaries, magazines, websites, monuments, biographies, murals, look-alike contests, musicals, drag shows, and more. Deborah Paredez explores the significance and broader meanings of this posthumous celebration of Selena, which she labels “Selenidad.” She considers the performer’s career...

In the tradition of women as the unsung keepers of history, Deborah Paredez’s second poetry collection tells her story as a Latina daughter of the Vietnam War.The title refers to the year 1970—the “year of the Metal Dog” in the lunar calendar—which was the year of the author’s birth, the year of her father’s deployment to Vietnam with a troop of Mexican-American immigrant soldiers, and a year of tremendous upheaval across the United States. Images from iconic photographs and her fa...

Muriel Rukeyser has many faces: poet, biographer, theorist, playwright, novelist, story-writer, filmmaker, translator, ethnographer, and innovator of social, documentary poetics; feminist, queer, Jewish, single mother, and social justice activist. Yet above all, she was a poet. Threaded through her work, politics, and life was the conviction that poetry is an animating force that connects people and disciplines. Recent years have seen a surge of renewed interest in Rukeyser’s work, bringin...