The Diva Devotee

Poet and scholar Deborah Paredez ’93, Ph.D., is redefining what it means to be a diva with her new book, American Diva. A self-described “diva devotee,” she examines how those with extraordinary virtuosity and a larger-than-life persona can exceed the bounds of what is normally considered appropriate behavior in public life to achieve a sense of freedom most only aspire to.

Paredez’s Tía Lucia gave her an early glimpse of what it means to be a diva.

“I learned from Tía early on that you didn’t have to have a lot of money to be a diva. You didn’t have to be white and glamorous by the standards of Hollywood to turn any kind of everyday moment into a grand and special event. That is the thing that a diva does,” Paredez explains.

For several years, Paredez, chair of the School of the Arts Writing Program at Columbia University, has taught a course based on the study of divas and how they can change the way we think about ideas like gender, race, fandom, and feminism. As the course’s final project, Paredez allows students to submit a critical research paper or a creative project. For example, one of her students, a former chef, produced a whole menu with each dish based on an aspect of how Dolly Parton lives life as a diva.

In her book, Paredez takes a closer look at celebrities like Tina Turner and Venus and Serena Williams to reveal how they have challenged American ideas about feminism, performance, and freedom, ideas Paredez was exposed to growing up in San Antonio. Her roots extend back to the time before Texas, with her mother’s family living in San Antonio since the 1730s and her father’s family hailing from Mexico. According to Paredez, this Tejano family identity played a part in shaping the writer she would become.

Paredez discovered her poetic potential in seventh grade, thanks to her teacher, Julie Bathke ’70.

“Even after I left junior high, we became friends, and she would continue to put books in my hands. She gave me my first edition of Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street. She gave me poetry by Sharon Olds, one of my longtime favorite poets,” Paredez recalls. “She was very instrumental in helping me become a poet and, actually, helping me understand I wanted to be a teacher as well.”

A graduate of MacArthur High School, Paredez entered Trinity with interests in theatre and literature, and she was fortunate to have Frank Kersnowski from the Department of English as her adviser. She remembers him being very generous with his office hours, putting resources in her hands and asking her questions that helped her understand what it means to be a poet. As a specialist in Irish poetry, he helped her see the bigger world of poetry beyond the United States. Outside of class, Paredez dived deeper into her interests by serving as the editor of the Trinity Review and performing in Trinity Theatre productions.

Trinity was also formative for Paredez’s sensibility as a feminist, for which she attributes all the credit to Paula Cooey’s gender and religion course.

“She was an amazing teacher. I look back on that class now, and I realize that’s when I became a feminist,” Paredez reflects. “Towards the end of the semester, I remember she asked us to develop a burning question around gender and religion that we felt had not been answered by the course material, and then she revealed that question was our final. She helped me refine my question, and the answer to that question turned into the basis for my essay to get into graduate school.”

When Paredez applied to graduate school, she was still interested in theatre, but she wanted to approach it from a scholarly perspective. Through Kersnowski, she found out about Northwestern University’s interdisciplinary theatre program.

“At the time, the idea of interdisciplinarity was more of a new thing. Now it’s more commonplace,” Paredez notes. “I really wanted to think beyond discipline and bring in all the various parts of myself as an artist and as a scholar.”

Paredez has embraced that interdisciplinary approach with her work, writing across different genres, from prose to poetry, from memoir to cultural criticism. Fresh off of publishing American Diva, she is now working on a book of poems focused on the issues of migration and climate change in relation to bodies of water as well as a project about thrifting.

Like the figures in American Diva, Paredez has taken on the role of a diva herself, unapologetically breaking the conventional boundaries of poetry and who has access to it in the United States. In 2009, she joined Norma Elia Cantú, Celeste Guzmán Mendoza, Pablo Miguel Martínez, and Carmen Tafolla in founding CantoMundo, a national organization for Latinx poets modeled after Cave Canem for African-American poets and Kundiman for Asian-American poets.

“For me, the point of pride about the organization is simply that it has built communities that have extended beyond it,” Paredez says. “For example, Javier Zamora, an esteemed Salvadoran writer, went on to create an organization for undocumented poets. I think seeing the ways in which community begets community like that has been really rewarding.”

CantoMundo, currently housed at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University, continues to grow, enriching and reshaping the landscape of the poetry of the Americas across regional, aesthetic, ethnic, racial, linguistic, and gendered spectrums. Paredez’s ultimate goal for CantoMundo?

“In the far future, my dream for CantoMundo would be that we wouldn't even need it because historically silenced Latinx poets would be so resourced and feel so much a part of the fabric of American literature that it will have served its purpose,” she says.