The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2023 Summer Literature Grant to Yesenia Montilla for her upcoming collection of poetry “American Thoroughbred”.

Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet & a daughter of immigrants. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry & Poetry in translation. She is Canto Mundo graduate fellow and a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow. Her work has been published in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast and in Best of American Poetry 2021, & 2022. Her poem Maps was part of Caroline Shaw’s oratorio “The Listeners” which debut in 2019. Her first collection The Pink Box is published by Willow Books & was longlisted for a PEN Open Book award. Her second collection Muse Found in a Colonized Body published by Four Way Books was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. She lives in New York City where she teaches poetry. She loves talking to trees and has never met an ocean that didn’t take her breath away.

Yesenia did not write her first “serious poem” she states, until her 30’s. She considers herself a late bloomer, but still right on time. When the pandemic began, she started to imagine a world where she could be a writer and professor full time. After having spent over 20 grueling years working in corporate America, a life of letters called to her.

Anaïs Nin wrote: life shrinks or expands according to one’s courage.

To be a woman of color in your 40’s with a dream built on freedom, to jump off the precipice, to wildly believe that what you envision for your life is possible is no small feat. Having had some incredible mentors, women poets, and writers who in no uncertain terms have claimed their place in the world regardless of circumstance or age was a great motivator for Yesenia. She writes, “I am part of an incredible women’s writing group led by the incomparable Cheryl Boyce Taylor & during these difficult times of transition in America & the world, Cheryl asks us to write through the uncertainty.” So began the idea for her new collection American Thoroughbred. These poems and this new collection are that: writing through times of great insecurity. Thinking of the many ways the world is shifting and the many ways we are moving away from our own humanity. What will become of us?

All her poems are written through the lens of a New Yorker; there is grit but also a hope that often surprises her. “My center is always radical love and collaboration. My dreams for the world are many, but at the center I think I am asking for us to relish in what binds us more than what divides us.”

In this new collection, American Thoroughbred Yesenia is looking at the planet in relation to climate change, as well as capitalism as a cause for not only the climate crisis but as a direct antithesis to the kind of freedom that so many are desperately seeking.

“2020 ruptured reality for so many people and had them re-evaluating their lives; me included. We are radically imagining a life of purpose dedicated to our art, we are hoping for more time with loved ones, we are hoping for financial ease and space to engage in deep knowing with the world. These poems are in conversation with these wants but will also tackle themes of labor in the states as well as the fractured relationship to capitalism and corporate America that women of color constantly face. The title comes from a conversation I had with a friend after her father died. She returned to work two days after the funeral. When I asked her why she had not taken more time she responded: I am an American Thoroughbred. That answer stayed with me and I began to interrogate my own relationship to labor.” Other subjects such as the notion of American exceptionalism and even the future in the midst of the dawning of AI will be present in this new work.

She was once a woman working way too many hours in a tiny cubicle. Helping someone else create immeasurable profits, helping someone else get the promotion that companies rarely give to women of color. She spent days dreaming of being a poet, of teaching poetry and of making a life in language. She hopes that her work and her story inspire other women: the singer, the musician, the dancer that sit at a corporate job wishing things could be different. She hopes through her journey they take flight and soar.

Please visit Yesenia’s Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and website for more information.