Pen Name:
None
Genre:
Memoir, Paranormal, Poetry, Women, Hispanic/Chicano, Historical, Spirituality, Racism, Sexism, Class Discrimination
Social Media:
Contact:
iamisabel13@yahoo.com
Bio
Retired university professor, civil rights activist, and lover of flowers.
More from Irene
If I must leave this world, it should be after viewing the golden firefly that visited me in my yard each year one more time. I am not okay living to a hundred, but do not want to die before I inform you that throughout my life, I wrote much poetry and that I was one of few women at the forefront of Chicano literature. This type of poetry was an important literary movement. Chicano and Chicana poetry was rooted in resistance to class discrimination, racism, and sexism. Early poets of the time created a genre that added to American literature another category. We had unique philosophical, topical, and aesthetic features different from the divisions of genres of the time. This literary movement provided language for comparing, contrasting, and discussing literary words and works, and served as an introduction to the formation of curricula and anthologies.
Books
Title: Dragonfly
Publisher: RMK Publications, LLC. (March 7, 2024)
Genre: Poetry
In this collection of fifty years of her poetry, Dr. Irene I. Blea brazenly relates her efforts to understand what she thought was wrong with her. She came to an understanding of social and historical factors that misinformed her colonized mind. Decolonization demanded evaluating her mind, body, and spirit and how she fed into it. She portrays decolonization as a complex process involving the rejection or redefinition of the colonizer’s language, embracing her own tri-cultural history, and commitment to ongoing learning and growth. This is a lifelong process that requires dedication and struggle to create a more just and equitable world and the author shares her transformation from the prescription of traditional female roles riddled by confusion and conflict to one of peace, understanding, and redefinition. This was a physical, psychological, and spiritual process that brought her to the understanding of what it means to be a female human in a sometimes hostile world.
Available for Sale
Title: Erené with Wolf Medicine
Publisher: Prickly Pear Publishing (2022)
Genre: Autobiography
There are many surprises in this book. In Erené With Wolf Medicine Irene I. Blea skillfully introduces us to her Native American, Chicano, and dominant cultural experiences. She carries us with her when she moves from a mountain to rural farm life, to an industrial city, and produces an intense memoir about growing up in an extended family during an era when women were expected to fit into prescribed ways of being and seeing the world. This is also a story about the complexities of being tri-cultural in a dominant society that does not frequently validate a young girl with wolf medicine. Nevertheless, Blea grew into a woman when People of Color broke out of the old constrictive ways of being. She introduces us to the concept of genízaro and highlights how she used wolf medicine to navigate the intersection of race, and class gender, and to define her own life while obtaining academic positions not normally held by those of her tri-cultural background.
Available for Sale
Prickly Pear Publishing
Amazon
Title: Beneath the Super Moon
Publisher: ABQ Press (2016)
Genre: Family Fiction
Irene Blea’s final book of her Suzanna trilogy. Suzanna is set free to live life freely after a life predetermined by others. Only now, in the twilight of life, does the radiance of her soul shine through. This transformation occurs during the lunar eclipse known as the Super Moon when the moon appears closest to earth. It is then that Suzanna is finally reunited with her long-lost children, but not before she confronts the darkness in her heart and the sorrow of her past.
Available for Sale
Title: Daughters of the West Mesa
Publisher: ABQ Press (2015)
Genre: Fiction
This book is based on the true story of the discovery of 11 female remains and an unborn fetus on Albuquerque’s West Mesa. It is New Mexico’s largest crime scene on a 100-acre part of the desert. Dora has purchased a new house. Her back wall separates her from the crime scene. Dora is also a single parent of two daughters, Luna and Andrea. Luna has been missing for several months. Is Luna buried in the field, or not?
Available for Sale
Title: Poor People’s Flowers
Publisher: ABQ Press (2014)
Genre: Family Fiction
In Poor People’s Flowers, Suzanna runs fast. Twice she ran away from men. Both times she ran until her throat and chest hurt. The first man was her husband. The second a stranger who promised to take her from New Mexico to Colorado in the mid 1930’s. Suzanna runs until she meets two other men, and a beautiful woman. One of them uses her, the other helps her. The woman teaches her to work in a working class bar, and together they search for the children Suzanna left behind when she ran.
Available for Sale
Title: Suzanna
Publisher: Floricanto Press (2012)
Genre: Family Fiction
At the time when young girls quickly grew up to become old women, young Suzanna was raised by her grandparents and married off to a much older man. This is the first book of Blea’s trilogy. Suzanna quickly births two sons, is forced to run away from her abusive husband, and leaves her sons behind.
