Interview with Claudia Castro Luna, recorded 17-JUNE-2022 via Zoom about her new book Cipota Under the Moon.

There’s war raging in Ukraine. A general feeling that a second U.S. Civil War is possible given the divisiveness of USAmerican politics. Children being murdered in schools is just “something we have to accept as a free society” according to 44% of Republicans in a June 5th CBS News poll. It’s got to feel like deja vu to Claudia Castro Luna, a war refugee from El Salvador’s civil war in the 80s. The correspondences are eerie in her new book Cipota Under the Moon published by Tia Chucha Press.

Claudia is a former Poet Laureate of the State of Washington and Cipota Under the Moon is described as “a testament to the men, women, and children who bet on life at all costs and now make their home in another language, in another place, which they, by their presence, change every day.”