Issue 21.2, Fall 2025
Welcome, all. We are grateful to share an abundance of work in this folio of eleven collaborations. Each original, each accompanied by thoughtful conversations about process, response, and the creative life of the writer and artist. This is our annual Translation feature, in which we offer two broadsides featuring poets writing in a language Indigenous to the Americas (this year, poets working in Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche people of Chile). We also have a new lesson plan for teachers out there who’d like to use these broadsides in their classroom.
Scroll on for the rest of the editors’ note, click the images to go right to the broadsides and conversations themselves.
Every November since 2012, Broadsided has presented works by writers creating in languages Indigenous to the Americas–sometimes wholly, sometimes in part. This is our annual Translation feature. We partner with poets and scholars to solicit and select these poems. In this year’s folio, editor Inés Hernandez-Avila has selected work by two poets working in Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche people of Chile, and she also offers history, context, and story to the beautiful work (read the full note on the link for each broadside):
According to Mapuche linguist and Indigenous rights activist Elisa Loncón, the Mapuche population is about 10% of the population of Chile…. The belief-system of the Mapuche, “people of the earth,” is the Azmapu, in which kinship with the earth, the value of good living, spiritual balance, the fervent centrality of their Word, and an infinite tenderness towards life are key principles…. Graciela Huinao is the first Mapuche woman to have been published and the first Mapuche writer to have been inducted into the Academia Chilena de la Lengua in 2014. Many of the creative writers, poets, and novelists, are also leading scholars whose work focuses on the Mapuche people, such as Maribel Mora Curriao, Daniela Catrileo, and Lara Millapan….
In “Pilmaiken weychafe,” “Golondrina Guerrera,” “Swallow Warrior Woman,” Mapuche poet María Isabel Millapan offers us a scene alive with the heart’s reach of seeing a relative, Swallow Warrior Woman, finding her nest gone on a windy, rainy day. The poem’s persona sings to the bird woman mother, urging her to keep going, because “justice has a soul.” The reciprocity between the poem’s persona and the swallow offer a tender bond emanating from the poet’s own consciousness of land dispossession. In the poem, “Ngillatun Lafken Meu,” “Ngillatun en la costa,” “Ngillatun on the coast,” Mapuche poet Graciela Huinao describes the Williche way of pausing for ceremony, to release and renew. In “unhook[ing] themselves from history,” they return to their beginnings, to protect themselves from the forces that want to overcome them, knowing that the Earth and the oceans are with them. Both poets manifest the palpable heightened love for their peoples, human and more-than-human, that rises from the deep core of their beings, and from their shared culture.
—Inés Hernandez-Avila
When we look at the folio as a whole–poems, art, broadsides–we are struck by the brightness and shadow that leap forward in such sharp contrast. Sunny yellow and monochromatic visual responses, poems of mourning and hope. As poet Jennifer Markell writes, “I’m noticing connections between swaths of sorrow bound to history and personal loss, held within wider fields of connection to nature and each other. There seem to be common voices of self-empowerment, finding courage, self-blessing.” In such a fragmented, vulnerable time, honoring sorrow and fostering hope are equally essential.
“I observe an incredible, overwhelming amount of beauty. There is no cynicism,” observes artist Elizabeth Terhune. We are so grateful for the full-minded, full-hearted, open engagement of these collaborators. As editors, we are buoyed by the work and conversations we are lucky enough to nurture and bring to the world in this unique format.
Madeline Hernstrom-Hill’s lesson plan for all ages is titled “Poetry-Based Collage.” Why not get out the scissors and glue and get to work? Create your own broadsides and engage your most open, curious, generous self.
Coming Up: Our next folio will come out in April/May, as will our annual Switcheroo call for written responses to visual work. We also are developing a new Broadsided Responds feature focused on A(rtificial) I(ntelligence) and what it can’t give, reflect, or access. Our call for submissions will launch in November, so please come back. We hope to release the finished broadsides early in the new year.
And now we turn it all over to you, reader. To consider, to share, to print, to bring to your office doors and community notice boards. Print a few and tuck them into a “Little Free Library” near you. Give one as a gift to a neighbor or a stranger on the bus. Let’s bring beauty and the slow, necessary wonder that these broadsides require to the worlds we live in.
We’ve gathered the full folio for you here for ease of printing. Return to the website to view each collaboration’s page, which holds interviews with the artist and writer including prompts for creative work, recent books and art they’ve been engaged with, and more.
With Gratitude,
Elizabeth Bradfield, Miller Oberman, Michelle Moncayo, Rajiv Mohabir, Poetry Editors
Millian Pham Lien Giang, Art Editor
Inés Hernandez-Avila, Translation Editor