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STRONG BOX HEART Sheila Sánchez Hatch ©2000 Cover illustration by Sarah K. Love WINGS PRESS ISBN: 0-930324-53-6 56 pp	Guadalupe and the KALEIDOSCOPIC SCREAMER Sheila Sánchez Hatch ©1996 Illustrations by WINGS PRESS ISBN: 0-930324-32-3 76pp

TOC	(12 of 15) ENAMORADO, EN LA GUERRA, Y RECONOCIENDO LA TIERRA by Juan Tejeda and CON RAZON CORAZON by Inés Hernandez

STRONG BOX HEART

8888About the Author

San Antonio native Sheila Sanchez Hatch Las published work for adults and children in a number of literary magazines and anthologies, including Daughters of the Fifth Sun (Riverhead, 1996), Floricanto! (Penguin, 1998) and Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review (1998). Selections from her first book,, Guadalupe and the Kaleidoscopic Screamer (Wings Press, 1996), were presented on Texas Public Radio's Today's Literary Texas and were included in the 24th Street Experiment Theater's production of South by Southwest. Sanchez Hatch has taught creative writing for the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, Our Lady the Lake University, and the San Antonio independent School District. She is a graduate of Vermont College and currently teaches English for the Alamo Community College District in San Antonio.

8888About the cover artist:
Sarah K. Love attended Syracuse University where see studied Illustration and Design. When not traveling between homes in Texas and New York, you can find her at San Antonio's Magik Children's Theater where see works as a scenic artist.

8888Back cover

The poems of Sheila Sanchez Hatch arrive full of the persistence of cactus and singing bold revolution.
8888—Pat Mora

There are thoughts and experiences spread through these pages like buried jewels. Selected phrases, inspired and entrancing, pull at the imagination behind the memory behind the soul. Brief images are verses rediscovered from a song centuries old, and it is when Sánchez Hatch explores the images of our origins that she is strongest, calling us to a "lush life" with Tlaloc and to "never leave the soft tropics of his heart." But it is when she confronts the present, in poems like "murder tv," "35," and "the movies aren't me," that she is the most interesting and the most courageous."
8888—Carmen Tafolla

About Guadalupe and the Kaleidoscopic Screamer
If Sheila Sánchez Hatch did not exist, we would have to invent her - so necessary is she as a bonafide role model for the young Latina writer of today. A serious writer of depth and integrity, she is 100% Tejana . . . and her mestiza guns are loaded.
8888—Angela de Hoyos

8888Guadalupe and the
8888KALEIDOSCOPIC SCREAMER

8888Introduction

Guadalupe and the Kaleidoscopic Screamer is a collection of memorable events recorded as fiction and poetry by a young American writer firmly rooted in the Latina experience. Sheila Sanchez Hatch explores the complex and often enigmatic issues of contemporary life, yet refuses to surrender the strengths and founding wisdom of either her personal past or that of her cultura. Eudora Welty stated in One Writer's Beginnings, "I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture." Sanchez Hatch has succeeded in recognizing those moments and capturing them in a language and style all her own.

At the heart of her work is a fascination with human relationships. The central characters in her stories probe the restraints placed upon them by the circumstances of modern life, giving Hatch's work a certain yearning undertone. In "Sin Palabras," there is "a little child . . . the one who stands in corners, watching, listening, but she cannot speak, cannot say one word in either language...." Hatch struggles to find strength from her memories (even if they are recreated scenarios of the lives of her abuelos) in order to come to an empowering feeling of peace at the realization of their deaths and of her loss. This is the work of fiction, to record the landmarks of memory, of imagination, of life itself, and to recognize what is in, around and beyond us in order to discover who we really are.

Although the central actors in her stories are women, she invites men to explore their planet with a conversational style that engages the mind as if she were really talking to the reader over dinner. In "The Bite of Shiny Little Animals," her use of wry humor and her self-deprecating depiction of a stalking victim offers a clear picture of how the systems of a civilized society can serve to victimize those they are designed to protect. All the while, the reader feels snared in the futility and anxiety of the central character, Mary Luna, as she comes to grips with the realization that she will become another homicide statistic, that she has been desensitized into passivity because of her feeling that in the

end, there's nothing one can really do.

The final story in this collection, "Querida Guadalupe," is a beautiful offering between a prayer and a supplication. As a very cognizant narrator observes the eclectic parade of pilgrims who have come to view and worship the marvel of the weeping virgin, we, ourselves, cannot help but marvel, empathize and become rapt in an innocence and spirituality that does not negate the intellect as the scene unfolds before us in prayer-like yet natural language. There is a longing in every human to seek for answers in a place beyond our own frailties and abilities. "Querida Guadalupe" recognizes that maybe even divinity needs a gentle push or reminder to get things moving when bogged down here where we need more action and less talk.

Sánchez Hatch also serves us with a generous and satisfying helping of her talent as a poet. Her poetry plumbs subjects from current social issues to personal crisises. In her poem "guileless," the writer reminds us that after the inception of life "vision is what will be needed...the clarity...to pass the surging womb and not ever forget the love of forms unknown." The reader will find the cultural metaphor in the poem "Guadalupe" extremely powerful and all too brief. " In "Life Take Five", modern-techno life as an explosion of colors and movement is captured uniquely with the metaphor of a "kaleidoscopic screamer"...always running in Dolby.

Sheila Sánchez Hatch has made an impressive debut with this collection. She tells her stories on her own terms in the language of a writer who is discovering her voice, using the materials of life and experience to recreate a world that has passed, that surrounds, and that will survive. Already included in such major anthologies as Daughters of the Fifth Sun, Hatch is ready to take her place among American writers of Mexican heritage with this tour de force work, Guadalupe and the Kaleidoscopic Screamer.

FERNANDO ESTEBAN FLORES
8888 Author of Ragged Borders English teacher, Associate 8888Editor of The Red Palm.

8888Guadalupe and the KALEIDOSCOPIC SCREAMER
8888Back cover text

Sheila Sánchez Hatch brings to her fiction and poetry the heat of blood and memory, then cools it with a level of sophisticated technique which enmeshes the reader in a web of time and perspective. Would that she would write a novel.
8888—Bryce Milligan Director, Literature Program 888888Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center

If the poet and fiction writer Sheila Sánchez Hatch did not
exist, we would have to invent her—so necessary is she as a bonafide role-model for the young Latina writer of today. Guadalupe and the Kaleidoscopic Screamer is a first collection of poems and cuentos, fully capable of giving her a

wide following. As Garcia Lorca might've said, Sheila "tieneduende. . ." Además, a serious writer of depth and integrity, she is lOO% Tejana . . . and her Mestiza guns are loaded .... Visual artist Carol Sánchez Hatch provides exciting cover art and illustrations throughout the book.
8888—Angela de Hoyos Author of Woman, Woman

We are the majority! Celebrate our writers and artists as we plan and pack for the new millennium. Important and crucial it will be that we take the words and voice of Sheila Sánchez Hatch with us. Guadalupe and the Kaleidoscopic Screamer will be in that collection.
8888—Trinidad Sánchez, Jr. Author of Why Am I So 88888 Brown?