publication date: March 18th, 2025

Volcanic Interruptions received an Honorable Mention in The Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award category, 2024 Int'l Latino Book Awards

Najarro’s poems and Trenchard’s paintings dialog about the feminine as power and life force, where volatility is strength and symbolized through the theme of vulcanism. 

Najarro’s poems and Trenchard’s paintings draw on vibrant earth energy so that the written word and image come together in coversation. In addition, theirs is a fiery collaboration between cultures where Latinx and White coexist, harmonize, and create a vision for a world where the vitality of women is highlighted in art.

"For its eye of the all-seeing crocodile half in dark waters and half in the prey-light of death and hunger, for its electric rush of love, its gambles with destiny, for its deep knowledge of borderlessness, the slippage of love and dissolution into something like Mystery makes this collection a rare magic. 

And perhaps, because of its woman eye, illusory skin, bleached colors and its various upside-down taboos where words and love-deeds are “hechas para atrás / pushed aside,” I commend this book. It is a surreal mathematics, a travelogue to ancestors, a gypsy’s deck of last-breath, plotting flowers ditching toward the sun. A tour de force, magnificent, lovely, sculpted, drenched with Borges, Sexton, Najarro. A radically new Latina verse." 

Juan Felipe Herrera
Poet Laureate of the United States (2015-2017)

"Between Nicaragua and the United States lives the Country of Spirit. This is where poet Adela Najarro breathes a world fresh and merciful with words that spring from the heart of our troubled lands, our families and our desire to love. I applaud her vital, luminescent and transcendent understanding that Mystery can be shared and understood, poem by poem. Embrace her work, for it is our future." 

Denise Chávez, Chicana author, playwright, and stage director

 I wrote this book for my children, my childrens, all the children of warm cinnamon spice. Too many negative messages about being shades of brown are etched onto our bodies, and I worry that these ideas will lead our youth to believe that they are less than stardust. So this book. This book is for you, all my childrens.

My Childrens is a chapbook that includes teaching resources. With My Childrens I hope to bring Latinx poetry into the classroom so that students can explore poetry, identity, and what it means to be Latinx in US society. Each poem in the collection is accompanied by a nonfiction comment, a writing prompt, comprehension questions, and “Look It Up!” suggestions.