Professional Documents
Culture Documents
here is a book in my
closet as old as myself. On the
cover a white, apple-cheeked
cherubim is in the process of tripping
over a banner of white silk. The angel
is laughing, diving headfirst into a
world that is all pink heaven cloud and
plush. The cover is quilted, and at the
edges where the cloth has worn I can
see through to the cardboard. Mami
bought the book before I was born and
filled its insides with the errata of my
birthx-ray images inside the womb,
inked footprints, a frayed hospital
bracelet marked Clnica Berraquel,
Bogot, Colombia. It is a familiar book,
meant to answer for a time none of us
remember. But already on the third
page, upon coming to the family tree, I
have an abundance of questions.
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Ingrid Rojas Contreras is the 2014 recipient of the Mary Tanenbaum Literary Award in Nonfiction. She is a 2015
fellow at the San Francisco Writer's Grotto and is in residence in Cassis, France, as part of the Bread Loaf Bakeless
Camargo Fellowship. Her writing is forthcoming or has been anthologized in Guernica Annual, Wise Latinas (University of Nebraska Press) and American Odysseys: Writings by New Americans (Dalkey Archive Press). Currently,
she is working on a nonfiction book about her grandfather, a medicine man who it is said could move clouds.
ingr i drojasc on tr er as. c om