Podcast Summary:

New Books Network — Aurora Levins Morales, "Silt: Prose Poems" (Palabrera Press, 2019)
Date: September 19, 2025
Host: Jeffrey Hurdley Jimera (with co-host Joanna Cifredo de Feldman)
Guest: Aurora Levins Morales

Episode Overview

This episode is an in-depth conversation between hosts Jeffrey Hurdley Jimera and Joanna Cifredo de Feldman, and the Puerto Rican Ashkenazi writer, poet, and activist Aurora Levins Morales, focusing on her prose poetry collection, Silt. The discussion weaves personal background, literary influence, the interplay of ecology and identity, and the book’s creation and themes. Core motifs include Caribbean identity, the intersections of art and justice, and the ecological and cultural meanings carried by water, language, and memory.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Aurora's Family & Artistic Upbringing

• Aurora’s parents, Dick Levins (radical biologist) and Rosario Morales (writer/artist), raised her amid books, intellectual curiosity, and political activism.
  • Quote [06:33, Aurora]:
    “Both our parents cultivated our curiosity and our passions. I was memorizing poems when I was 6. My parents just piled up books for me, and I began writing poetry when I was 6 or 7.”
• The boundary between art and social justice was never fixed. Her home was filled with radical literature, Cuban movie posters, and a love for nature.
  • Quote [10:43, Aurora]:
    “For me, there was not any separation between art making and social justice.”

2. The Meaning of ‘America’ and Rootedness in Puerto Rico

• Both Aurora and Joanna discuss the expansive sense of "American" as intersecting cultures/identities across Las Américas.
• Aurora and Joanna reflect on the transformative, grounding power of living in Puerto Rico compared to the U.S. mainland:
  • Quote [12:30, Aurora]:
    “I spent 52 years in the States...I never put down a single little root. When I got [to Puerto Rico], it was as if I'd been holding my breath for half a century...and I have felt my rootedness in this soil is making different things come out my mouth than they did in California.”
  • Quote [15:15, Joanna]:
    “I left Puerto Rico in 9th grade and...moved back in 2019 after being in the States for like 15 years. I always felt like a Puerto Rican living in Florida or New York...But here, I feel the opposite of displaced.”

3. Creative Democracy & Telling Collective Stories

• Aurora stresses that creativity is universal but not equally permitted, reflecting on how her own privileges and radical family encouraged her voice.
  • Quote [20:21, Aurora]:
    “I am a believer in the democratization of creativity...We all have the capacity and we don’t all have the permission...I was raised with an enormous amount of encouragement and permission.”
• She recounts the impact of her and her mother’s writing for Puerto Rican women who “see themselves between the covers of a book for the first time.”
  • Quote [24:05, Aurora]:
    “I did my work, that I told the stories of my people, and particularly the women of my people, in a way that held up a mirror, that gave people a place to be proud.”

4. Origins & Journey of "Silt"

• The book was inspired by both personal history and broader ecological, historical, and cultural currents.
  • The project began with a Mississippi River residency in New Orleans and, after many years and life events (including Katrina), was completed once Aurora returned to Puerto Rico.
  • Quote [24:52, Aurora]:
    “I was traveling with a young Puerto Rican woman...collecting feelings, impressions, stories, faces, landscapes as we drove downstream...That sense of what water carries...running water crossing human history and crossing cultures and crossing all kinds of struggles for better lives.”
  • Quote [28:30, Aurora]:
    “The book was waiting for my life to catch up with it...The Mississippi River brought me to Marikao.”

5. Language, Identity, and Spanglish Fluidity

• Aurora describes language as unconstrained—Spanglish as her ‘first language,’ her writing shaped by both Spanish and English and the multicultural linguistic tapestry of Puerto Rico.
  • Quote [30:41, Aurora]:
    “Spanglish is my first language...My syntax in English is shaped by my thinking in Spanish...there’s a liquidity to how I write in English.”
  • She draws map-wide connections: “Loving the tangle of people moving across maps and making language constantly shifted.”
• On returning to Puerto Rico, she witnesses attitudes about linguistic purity and stands for both "trans liberation and Spanglish."

6. Process of Research, Writing, and Learning

• Aurora’s research-dense writing weaves scientific, historical, and oral sources into poetry.
  • Quote [34:23, Aurora]:
    “For me, the creative process, the research process, the play part, the actual putting things on the page—they’re inseparable...My work tends to be very research dense.”
• She illustrates the metaphorical power of ecological details:
  • Quote [37:38, Aurora]:
    “The amount of water that seeps under the levees through those paleochannels is equivalent to the entire flow of the Hudson River...an amazing metaphor for how we resist control and how we find our way under boundaries and extend ourselves across landscapes.”

7. Ecology, Interconnectedness, & Responsibility

• Aurora articulates a philosophy of ecology that denies separation between humans and nature; relationship and kinship are essential.
  • Quote [39:12, Aurora]:
    “There’s not like nature and humans. We’re not outside. We are part of one biosphere, one global complex being. And we’re not the most important part...the separation between our bodies and our environments is as artificial as the body/mind separation.”
• Reweaving severed relationships, with humility, is “our only hope.”

8. Advice to Students—Bridging Humanities and Science

• Aurora encourages students to “pay attention to which rules you want to break and break them. Cross boundaries, looking for what you care about. Trust your instincts.” ([42:04])
• She advocates for artists learning scientific literacy, and for scientists learning to communicate with creativity and passion.
  • Quote [42:04, Aurora]:
    “Keep one foot in the place where your mind can go anywhere and let it do that...The bridge between the humanities and the sciences is where I live.”
• She sees storytelling as the lingua franca between the disciplines.
  • Quote [46:55, Aurora]:
    “We’re all storytellers...Scientists and people in humanities, people who are artists...just need to speak each other’s languages and get some harmonies going.”

9. Upcoming Projects & Ongoing Work

• Aurora describes Ferment, a project exploring pesticides, illness, interspecies relationships, and the redemptive power of bacteria.
  • Quote [47:30, Aurora]:
    “What if we live in interspecies alliance? Bacteria...can clean up the residues of war. So what does it mean if we shift our perspective towards collective fermentation?”
• She is also co-editing a journal issue exploring William Carlos Williams and delving into women and illness in cultural history.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On creativity and inclusivity:
  “I believe that we all have the capacity and we don’t all have the permission...”
  — Aurora Levins Morales [20:21]

• On the central metaphor of "Silt":
  “That sense of what water carries...running water crossing human history and cultures and all kinds of struggles for better lives.”
  — Aurora Levins Morales [25:45]

• On coming home:
  “When I got here, it was as if I'd been holding my breath for half a century without even knowing it.”
  — Aurora Levins Morales [12:34]

• On storytelling and impact:
  “It’s because you told our stories, that’s why you think you know my face. Para mí, that’s a Pulitzer. I don’t need any other prize.”
  — Aurora Levins Morales recounting a reader interaction [23:35]

• On the harmony between art and science:
  “We’re all storytellers...They just need to speak each other’s languages and get some harmonies going.”
  — Aurora Levins Morales [46:55]

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [06:33] – Aurora discusses her parents, intellectual upbringing, and creative freedom
• [12:30] – On Puerto Rican identity, returning home, and feeling rooted
• [20:21] – Democratization of creativity and the impact of her writing
• [24:52] – Origins of "Silt" and the metaphorical power of water
• [30:41] – Language, Spanglish, and writing as a reflection of cultural mélange
• [34:23] – Research as creative process and the ecological metaphor of the Mississippi
• [39:12] – Aurora's philosophy of ecology and human/nature kinship
• [42:04] – Advice for students and bridging humanities with science
• [47:30] – Current projects: "Ferment" and explorations of chemical ecology and interspecies collaboration

Tone and Takeaway

The conversation is deeply reflective, poetic, and grounded in lived experience. Aurora’s storytelling bridges science, art, and activism, inviting listeners to see their own stories as worthy of being told and to view the world—and their place in it—ecologically, relationally, and expansively. The episode makes a powerful case for creative and intellectual border crossing, ecological humility, and forging connections across disciplines, languages, and histories.

For listeners:
This episode is as much invitation as interview: a call to claim creative freedom, to break boundaries, and to recognize every thread—personal, cultural, ecological—as part of a vibrant, shared silt flowing toward home.