Listen in to an oral history conversation with poet Maria Melendez Kelson, interviewed by poet Steven Cordova, as part of the Letras Latinas Oral History Project. Though Melendez Kelson’s most recent work is the contemporary mystery novel Not the Killing Kind, this conversation uncovers her artistic life as a poet in the period before she embarked on her career as a novelist. Melendez Kelson discusses how her mother’s imaginative summer incentive to pay her for childhood poems with ice cream gave her an early knowledge that writing could be a calling or vocation, how the solitude of wildlife biology fieldwork led her to befriend her writing, and her mission to share the important contributions of Latino and Latina poets to the body of works that advocate for honoring nature and our environment.

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