dance company, One World Dance Theater. Rebe collaborates with native artists in Cuba and South America, has been featured in Latina Magazine, Chicago Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune and on Fox and ABC News. The recipient of an Ohio Individual Excellence award, Huntman has received support for this book from the Ohio State University, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation, Playa, Hambidge Center, and Brush Creek Foundation. She lives in Delaware, Ohio and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
Huntman's new book is My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle.
At Lit Hub the author tagged "seven richly-rendered memoirs, ... each offers up its own distinct lens on the people and stories that make up the dynamic and ever-changing landscape that is Cuba." One title on the list:
Daisy Hernández, A Cup of Water Under My BedRead about the other entries on Huntman's list.
“The first man I love and the first woman I adore, my father and my mother with their Spanish words, are not in these cards,” Hernández writes about the flash cards her teachers use to render a language that sounds—to a child growing up among her half-Cuban, half-Colombian family in 1980s and 90s New Jersey—”like marbles in the mouth.”
Through lyrical prose that dances between the English of the country she inhabits and the Spanish of those who raise her, Hernández invites us into a world where “cuarticos” hold African gods and women read cups of water that “ferry messages between us and the santos and the dead.” As someone who writes in My Mother in Havana about discovering Santería as an adult, I was delighted to read how Hernández stumbles upon its rituals through the eyes of a child.
--Marshal Zeringue
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