One-Bedroom Solo

In her debut poetry collection, One-Bedroom Solo (2011), Latinx author Sheila Maldonado explores the songs and rhythms of classic bachata music, rap, hip-hop, and funk to describe her heritage as a Honduran woman and her life in New York City. Her poems are both profoundly political and open to the humor and mundanity of daily life in urban America.

Maldonado is a Latin American woman who was raised on Coney Island by Honduran parents. Her book deals explicitly with the realities of life as a young woman of color living in an urban space. In particular, she is interested in political language, and how it interacts and merges with the humorous, the personal, and even the mundane.

Concerned with sound and rhythm in her debut collection of poems, Maldonado briefly discusses a bachata song, inviting an interpretation of her text through a musical lens. Bachata music is a genre from the Dominican Republic and other Spanish-speaking Caribbean islands, like Honduras, where Maldonado's family originated. The music is like the blues—the original name translated as “bitter music”— offering an emotional look at the world through heartbreak and pain. Like bachata music, Maldonado is interested in the bitterness of life; many of her poems are born from a place of pain, both personal and socio-political. She writes blues poems about immigration, gender, and heritage with frankness and depth.



Maldonado's themes include family, belonging, heritage, and identity. She writes about her native island and the border that runs through it, dividing her people and causing her family great pain even from a distance—though she was raised in New York, her connection to her roots and the plight of the nation she comes from is preeminent in her poems. This border, and many others, become the subject of the most political poems in Maldonado's collection. She is interested in and advocates for a revolution that will tear down borders, unifying nations—both in Honduras and in her native America.

Also interested in personal revolutions, her collection's title comes from her bedroom, which Maldonado writes about with candor, humor, and openness. The political meets the personal in these sections on family, heartbreak and love, individuality, and more. Mixed among these personal poems are humorous anecdotes, such as a poem reflecting on an evasive parking spot that will never be found and one on a conversation about skin lotion.

In poems that follow their own rhythm and make their own forms, Maldonado deals with class, gender, heritage, and more. From an ironic poem on the poet's jealousy over another poet's perceived poverty to a poem that equates the classroom space to the act of submission, Maldonado is attuned to the sounds of her people and also to the mixed tunes that reflect her hybridity and her complexity.



A poet from Coney Island, Sheila Maldonado’s family comes from Honduras. One-bedroom Solo is her debut collection of poems; her second collection is coming out through Brooklyn Arts Press. A CatoMundo Fellow, she belongs to several organizations concerned with visual writing. She has served as a Cultural Envoy to Honduras for the US State Department and currently teaches creative writing at the City University of New York. Her work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Ping Pong, Rattapallax, Callaloo, and Luna Luna, among other journals. She has been anthologized in The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States, Me No Habla with Acento: Contemporary Latino Poetry, and Brooklyn Poets Anthology.