Caridad Moro-Gronlier was one of OutSFL’s six queer poets featured for National Poetry Month in April. A Cuban-American, her poetry collection "Tortillera" embraces and reclaims the word "tortillera," a term for lesbian in Spanish often regarded as a slur in some Cuban-American homes. Moro-Gronlier moved from Los Angeles to Miami at 9 years old.
She was named Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County on April 1. She is conceptualizing a project connecting elders with poetry. Her plan involves having local poets converse with elders about their lives and then crafting poems to share their stories.
“Especially the elders LGBTQ community, there's so much loneliness there, right?” she said. “A lot of them, you know, once their partners pass, many don't have children. Many of that generation are still estranged from the family. So any effort to try and quell that loneliness in any way, and to do it through poetry is I think a wonderful way to do it, and it also is going to humble the younger poets. Like I'm 55 and I've never understood that I'm going to get old like I understand right now. I don't think that it's cognitively possible to really get what that means, until you start to break down, you know what I mean?”
Moro-Gronlier is married and said that the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage was a few days after their wedding in Bora Bora.
“We didn't know, because we were in the middle of nowhere, and I felt like it was the universe,” she said. “I got maybe 15 minutes of reception so that I could see the news and then it went away. It was awesome.”
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