Abigail Carl-Klassen is a writer, researcher, poet, educator, translator and activist who lives in El Paso, Texas. She grew up in the oilfields of the Permian Basin alongside Old Colony Mennonite immigrants from Mexico. She has worked in education, language services, community development, social science research and agriculture in a variety of contexts across the United States and Latin America. She has an MFA in bilingual creative writing from the University of Texas-El Paso and has taught at UTEP and El Paso Community College. She has published two poetry chapbooks, Ain’t Country Like You (Digging Press) and Shelter Management (dancing girl press), and received the 2022 Bougainvillea Poetry Prize from FlowerSong Press of McAllen, Texas, which will publish Village Mechanics later this year. Carl-Klassen says of the book, “These poems pre-date the [‘Rebels, Exiles, and Bridge Builders’] oral history project, but are set in the same location. It is part oral history and part poetic imagining of events that have been lost to history through the keeping of secrets and the passage of time.”
July 11, 2023
Issue 2023, vol. 77
[Editor’s note: This piece samples some of the work of Abigail Carl-Klassen, presented at the international conference Mennonite/s Writing IX, “Thirty Years of Mennonite/s Writing: Responding to the Past, Creating […]