Every Monday at Mano a Mano, a New York center dedicated to celebrating Mexican culture, the members of NY Writers Coalition's Spanish language creative writing workshop gather to slough off the prodigious stresses of their city lives through writing. The expectation and camaraderie of the assembling group is thrilling. Though most of "Los Lunes" ("The Monday People," as they call themselves on their blog http: //loslunes.wordpress.com) have some level of bilingual skills, they choose to write in Spanish (spiced with a good dose of English and Spanglish). Mano a Mano is a safe space for them...

In April of 2010 (National Poetry Month for those of you who don't know this already), we agreed to take part in the annual "Poem-a-Day" Challenge - a project wherein poets (and other brave souls) write at least one poem a day for the entire month of April. There are myriad blogs and websites that encourage posting these poems but being the private people we are, Mary Ellen set up a Wiggio site that only the two of us could view. Here, over the course of the month, we posted a variety of poems - sometimes only one a day, sometimes more. These poems were written during breaks at work, during...