While traditional mainstream news often would give me mixed messages about social unrest around the world, I learned about war through the Mexican oral tradition of narcocorridos alongside the songs of Israeli singer Aviv Geffen. Popular culture also affected my work as a young poet in the late 90s, especially those with social-conscious messages such as the group A Tribe Called Quest, Kevin Smith’s Dogma or the Benetton ads that challenged social conceptions of sexuality, family and world hunger. I grew up learning not history, but histories, through writers who crossed genres, such as Mexican-American Americo Paredes who witnessed the ever-changing borderlands as a journalist, folklorist and novelist as well as learning “code-switching” from Pat Mora, a poet, children’s author and essayist. Another part of my life I spent on the border of East and West Jerusalem. Paul Celan ends his poem “Ashglory” with the formidable words: “No one bears witness for the witness.” Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, I spent a good deal of my childhood on the U.S-Mexican border, near the Gulf Coast. A recipient of fellowships and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, City Artists Corps, CantoMundo and Queens Council on the Arts, her work has been commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial in NYC. Ben-Oni’s work appears in POETRY, APR, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Society of America, Tin House, and Guernica, among others. MFA, author of If This Is the Age We End Discovery which won the 2019 Alice James Award, and turn around, BRXGHT XYXS, and 20 Atomic Sonnets.
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