By Christopher Soto
FROM: L.A. Times

The majority of American readers are, unfortunately, unfamiliar with the name tatiana de la tierra. By way of introduction, here is how the late writer described herself in the essay “Aliens and Others”: “I am a fat, slightly bearded lesbian. A white Latina of Colombian extraction. A pagan lacking in Catholic guilt. A hedonist who knows shame. I have been diagnosed with lupus. Drive a pink and purple pickup. Collect rocks. Been poor most of my life. Knew gold-plated Gucci wealth for a few memorable years. I am a writer.”

De la tierra was born under a different name in Villavicencio, Colombia, in 1961, grew up in Miami and died in Long Beach, Calif., in 2012. She wrote fierce, bawdy, politically outspoken literature and edited some of the first Latina lesbian publications distributed in the U.S. and Latin America. Though she herself never broke into the literary mainstream anywhere, she wrote of and for writers at the margins of the margins everywhere.

This fall, a Colombian publisher has compiled her chapbooks and a few other works into a single collection for the first time under the title “Redonda y Radical.” With any luck, this is just the beginning of a long posthumous career.

During her lifetime, de la tierra published two professionally bound books. The first was “For the Hard Ones: A Lesbian Phenomenology,” described as “A lesbian manifesto for hardcore dykes, baby dykes, and wanna-be lesbians.” A bilingual edition was brought back into print in 2018. Her other book, “Xia y las mil sirenas,” published in Mexico in 2009, was a children’s book about mermaids, lesbian mothers and the power of chosen family. Read Rest of Article Here