Juana Peñate Montejo

Trans. by Carol Rose Little and Charlotte Milholland Friedman

I AM THE NIGHT

Night scent of wind,
my body, a dream,
as the fire burns down.

Carol Rose Little is an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Oklahoma. She has been working with Ch’ol communities in Chiapas, Mexico since 2015 and holds a PhD in linguistics from Cornell University.

Charlotte Milholland Friedman, MFA, MS, is a poet and author (The Girl Pages, Hyperion). She teaches Narrative Medicine in the English Department at Barnard College, Columbia University, and has taught writing and narrative medicine workshops for a variety of audiences. Her poetry has been published in the Connecticut River Review, Intima, and elsewhere.

Juana Peñate Montejo (previously published as Juana Karen), a lawyer by training, is a Ch’ol poet, writer, translator, educator, and cultural promoter from Emiliano Zapata, Tumbalá, Chiapas, Mexico. She has authored several books of poetry in Ch’ol with self-translations in Spanish including Mi nombre ya no es silencio (Coneculta, 2002), Ipusik’al Matye’lum/Heart of a Wild Land, (Pluralia, 2013), and most recently Isoñil Ja’al/Dance of the Rain, which won the 2020 Premio de Literaturas Indígenas de América to be published by the University of Guadalajara, as well as Tsa’ Kñajle . . . Jump’ej K’iñ, Jump’ej K’iñ. . ./One Day, One Day . . . I Dreamed . . . to be co-published this year by Oralibrura and Lakñichimal.