Amelia Díaz Ettinger

A brief look to a very long life:

Born in Mexico and raised in Puerto Rico, Amelia Díaz Ettinger has written poems that reflect the struggle with identity often found in immigrants. She began writing poetry at age three by dictating her poems out loud to her uncles who wrote them down for her. Amelia continued writing poems and short stories throughout her life. Her writing took a back seat while she raised two wonderful human beings and worked as a high school teacher. Now retired, she has renewed her writing with fervor. She currently resides in Summerville, Oregon with her husband Chip, her dog Pi, and seven unnamed chickens.

What other authors have said about Speaking At A Time:

Peter Sears, Oregon's Poet Laureate:

Amelia Díaz Ettinger's book of poems, "Speaking at a Time," is a gathering of poems about her father, her daughter, the town of Caguas, and the race track, among other things. These recollections pulse with energy, and they echo the poetry of Lorca and Neruda. This is a strong, first book.

George Venn, Eastern Oregon University, professor and author

In SPEAKING AT A TIME, Amelia Díaz Ettinger dramatizes two contrasting themes. Vividly and clearly, she illuminates and celebrates growing up in 1960s Puerto Rico. Written during the 1990s, many of these poems remember and name what she loves–the tropical riches of mango, plantain, lizards, mountain, ocean, sea winds. They recall the intimate lives of those who loved her–father, uncles, cousins, aunts. They celebrate the daily lives of working people– machetero, campesino, housemaid, servant. In a forthright bilingual vernacular, the poet gives the reader vivid catalogs and images of her urban childhood and adolescence in Caguas–a physician’s daughter thriving in a complex multi-cultural milieu. Some evenings after dinner, she listened to her father and uncles reciting Spanish and Puerto Rican poetry. On television, she heard Pales Matos and Nicolas Guillen. At school she learned to write her own poems. In 1974, everything changed: she immigrated to the United States and began her quest for an education, love, career, marriage, family. In the 1990s, while Diaz Ettinger was raising her children in Eastern Oregon, far from any community of Puerto Rican writers or poets such as those Nuyoricans who publish their experiences in the United States, she realized that her successful immigrant quest had created great cultural and linguistic distance between herself and her children. So, the second theme in SPEAKING AT A TIME appears: conflicts between immigration and integration, between the poet’s past and present, between English and Spanish, conflicts caused by alienation and isolation, and the demand to resolve those conflicts by validating and celebrating her Carribean heritage. In these contrapuntal poems, the poet’s bi-lingual texts and translations symbolize one successful synthesis of cultures and languages, while she continues to document, examine, and question what it means to be a Puerto Rican writer in exile. This is strong and honest work–filled with love and grief and eloquence. With these solo pages, she joins her contemporaries–Victor Hernandez Cruz, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Tato Laviera.