Puerto Rican Poet Loretta Collins Klobah / Oil Painting on Front Cover: Ángel Plenero by Samuel Lind
Photo Credit: Peepal Tree Press (UK, 2018)

My Poetry Corner April 2025 features the title poem from the poetry collection Ricantations (Peepal Tree Press, 2018) by Puerto Rican poet Loretta Collins Klobah. Born in Merced, California, she earned an M.F.A. in poetry writing from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she also completed a doctoral degree in English, with an emphasis on Caribbean literary and cultural studies. She spent four of the nine years of her doctoral study in Jamaica (Caribbean) and West Indian neighborhoods of Toronto (Canada) and London (UK). Since the late 1990s, she lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she is a professor of Caribbean literature and creative writing at the University of Puerto Rico.

Growing up in an English and Spanish working-class household has influenced Klobah’s style of blending Spanish and English in her work. Her mother had Spanish and Scottish heritage, her father Cherokee and Irish. Her Mexican American godparents taught her Spanish, widely spoken in Merced where she grew up. The title of her collection Ricantations appears to be a blend of these two languages.

Klobah began writing poetry in primary school as a way of processing life and engaging with the world. At eighteen years, on becoming part of the active poetry community in Fresno, California, she began receiving serious mentoring from former US Poet Laureate Philip Levine and other award-winning poets.

“I don’t write love poetry, and I don’t rhyme,” Klobah told Trinidadian poet Andre Bagoo during a 2012 interview for the Caribbean Beat magazine, following the release of her award-winning debut poetry collection. “I write because I want to communicate with readers in a way that matters, makes an impact, or makes some kind of beneficial difference in the reader’s thoughts and in the society.”