Works-In-Progress
Her Mexico Blurs:
Poems from Iowa on Identity & Place
In Her Mexico Blurs, American Latina poet Emily Lupita maps the complex terrain of her dual heritage, tracing the blurred lines between Iowa and Mexico, past and present, history and herstory.
This collection, divided into three sections (Heredity, Codices, and Frontier), weaves personal memory with ancestral myth, from the Mayan Popol Vuh to the spectral presence of La Malinche. Through vivid, sensory poems, Emily Lupita explores the weight of inheritance, the violence of conquest, and the enduring struggle to piece together an identity from the fragments of a colonized past.
Full of both raw honesty and tenderness, this is a journey into the heart of what it means to be caught between two worlds, forever navigating the borderlands of self, family, and nation.
Current stage: Forthcoming in 2027 from Meadowlark Press as part of the Finalist Title Series for the Birdy Poetry Prize.
Artist Travel Memoir: Year One
Written as 12 letters to her Companeras de Camino (Traveling Companions), artist and teacher Emily Lupita traces two decades from a rural Iowa childhood to Mexico & across the world.
After the journals that held her life’s record were destroyed, she rebuilds her memory from what life keeps: a passion play in the Yucatan, an owl that returns across three countries, a curandera’s healing hands, a hammam in Ankara, a train that missed her by inches in Puebla.
Weaving Mexican-American heritage and Catholic faith through a mother’s fiercelove, Artist Travel Memoir moves toward a hard-won spiritual reckoning and the question threading every letter: Can God still see us?
Includes an accompanying workbook with craft techniques and writing prompts for the reader to begin writing her own memoir in letters.
Current stage: The first draft & line editing are finished. Ready for querying.
Last Drop of a Holy Drink:
My Mexican Mother & the American Dream
Emily Lupita’s mother, Juana Maria, was a child immigrant from Mexico to Iowa. Juana was only twelve years old when her parents took the four youngest children and crossed into the United States, leaving the four eldest siblings behind. The family split in two.
Last Drop of a Holy Drink is the story of what happened when Emily Lupita brought her mother back. Part travel memoir, part family archaeology, part love letter to a woman who carried Mexico inside her body through four decades of Iowa winters, this book follows mother and daughter through the cobblestone streets of the Colonia Industrial to a long-lost sister, a childhood home with Guadalupe still on the wall, and a cemetery so large it has its own road signs, where three siblings finally stood together at their brother’s grave and sang a hymn at the top of their lungs.
Emily Lupita, half-Mexican and half-uncertain of what that means, trails behind with a camera, asking the questions she needed to better understand her place in the world: Why did they leave? Who did they leave behind?
Last Drop of a Holy Drink is a memoir about borders: the ones drawn on maps, the ones drawn between generations, and the ones we carry in our bodies long after we have crossed them. It is a book about what is lost when a family splits and what, against all odds, survives: the smell of goat-milk caramel on an open fire, a cloth doll in a bright skirt, the melody of a prayer you don’t have the words for anymore but can still remember how to hum.
Current stage: The first draft is finished. I’m on chapter 16 of 45 chapters of my read aloud line editing.
The Poet’s Daughter:
Growing Up Off-Grid with the American Bardic Poet
Emily Lupita grew up without running water or modern conveniences on a remote homestead in rural Iowa, the daughter of a bardic poet who claimed his poems arrived from entities in other realms. Her childhood was shaped by the extraordinary beauty of hunting rabbits under a moonlit sky, kneeling over deer in the snow to give thanks before butchering, and watching her father compose verse to the wood stove at midnight. But also by genuine dangers of a socially isolated, off-grid life.
Now in her late forties, Emily returns to ask the questions she has been accumulating her whole life. What drew her father to this radical, uncompromising existence? The Poet’s Daughter does not resolve into easy reconciliation or condemnation. What it offers instead is two truths held in the same hands without forcing either one to disappear. The childhood was both magically alive and materially precarious.
Emily Lupita has built a mainstream adult life while still dreaming of rabbit heads arranged in the shape of the Big Dipper out in the field of her Iowa youth. This is a book about what we inherit from the people who shaped us, especially when their shaping was both gift and wound. It is also a book about the candle and the flame: separate entities, inherently and inversely related, neither one complete without the other.
Current stage: The first draft is finished. I’m ready to start my read aloud line editing.
Midwest Mestiza:
Notes From Iowa on Identity & Place
Essays on culture & craft in writing from a unique Mexican American perspective, including reflections on the historical & mythic women in the poems from my forthcoming collection Her Mexico Blurs and the creative process behind my memoir-in-progress Last Drop of a Holy Drink: My Mexican Mother and the American Dream.
Current stage: My outline is finished. I’ve started writing the letters. I’m posting them weekly on my Substack: