Letters to a Young Brown Girl by Barbara Jane Reyes

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Barbara Jane Reyes answers the questions of Filipino American girls and young women of color with bold affirmations of hard-won empathy, fierce intelligence, and a fine-tuned B.S. detector. The Brown Girl of these poems is fed up with being shushed, with being constantly told how foreign and unattractive and unwanted she is. She’s flipping tables and throwing chairs. She’s raising her voice. Simultaneously looking into the mirror and out into the world, Reyes exposes the sensitive nerve-endings of life under patriarchy as a visible immigrant woman of color as she reaches towards her unflinching center.

Barbara Jane Reyes is an Oakland-based author and educator who was born in Manila and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of six books of poetry, including Invocation to Daughters (City Lights, 2017), Diwata (BOA, 2010), and the James Laughlin Award-winning Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005). She teaches in the Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program at the University of San Francisco. For more information about Barbara Jane Reyes, visit barbarajanereyes.com.