Spilling the Light: Meditations on Hope and Resilience

The light must spill to shine.

The thing you must be is yourself.

Intimate and uncompromising, Rev. Julián Jamaica Soto’s debut collection Spilling the Light is a luminous offering to their communities and a defiant declaration of their worth in a world hostile to their queer, disabled, and brown being. ＂America, is this freedom?＂ they ask. ＂I cannot prove to you that / I am a person,＂ writing boldly of identity, community, liberation, and erasure through a prism of tender moments and powerful reckonings. These are poems of broken hallelujahs and codes/witching, of hunger and fire, of hope and resilience. They are complex, tender, and empowering. They embolden us to become our truest selves, willing us to survive.

Rev. Julián Jamaica Soto (formerly Theresa) is a Unitarian Universalist minister and activist. They have worked in parish ministry, interim ministry, and hospital chaplaincy with veterans. Soto lives in the Pacific Northwest and seeks to serve the mission and values of Unitarian Universalism, along with the healing of the world.