Honora Spicer

Immigration Detention in Rhode Island from Origins to End: A Brief History

Future Document

Forthcoming May 2026

The Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, Rhode Island is an institution with a sordid record of medical neglect and abuse—and presently imprisons around 110 people per night through a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Wyatt represents one node in a transnational web of detention and deportation. Yet the detention system, and its presence in Rhode Island, has a history— it has not always existed, and it will end. This Brief History asks: How can we locate immigration detention in Rhode Island in relation to historical time? Written in the past tense about a still-unfolding present, this Brief History draws on archival documents to connect the dots between colonial underpinnings, the earliest contracts for detention space leased by the Immigration Service in Providence in the 1910s, and the legislative campaign to end contracts for immigration detention in Rhode Island in the 2020s. A source-based account of the past culminating in a speculative history of the present, this Brief History signals a future not foreclosed.

~~And Death Shall Have No Dominion~~ / Killing ‘The Mother’

by Victoria Guerrero-Peirano, translated by Honora Spicer

Tripwire Editions

Forthcoming June 1, 2026

> Pre-order via Asterism Books

Winner of the Peruvian Ministry of Culture’s 2020 National Literature Award in Nonfiction. And death shall have no dominion / Killing ‘The Mother’ charts death inside healthcare bureaucracy through brutal, surreal and fragmentary poetic prose, grappling with the capitalist devastation of systems of social care and how writing might enact forms of conception in the face of such conditions. Victoria Guerrero-Peirano has been recognized as one of the most singular and powerful voices of contemporary Peruvian poetry.

Excerpt
Translation Tuesday, Asymptote, July 2024

Essay
Spitting Sutures, Asymptote, July 2024

Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress

by Victoria Guerrero, translated by Honora Spicer and Anastatia Spicer

Cardboard House Press

2025

Covers letterpress printed at Bidon Community Printshop in Providence, RI

> Order

Excerpts
> Poesía en Acción, Action Books, November 15, 2022

> Temporary Archives: Poetry by Women of Latin America, ed. by Juana Adcock and Jèssica Pujol Duran ARC Publications, November 2022

> Poem-A-Day Academy of American Poets, September 6, 2021

> Asymptote Journal, October 2020

> American Literary Translators Association Conference, October 2020

Interview
Diary of a Proletarian Seamstress: An Interview with Honora Spicer and Anastatia Spicer By Austyn Wohlers on Action Books Blog, December 2020

And Suddenly I Was Just Dancing

by Tilsa Otta, translated by Honora Spicer

Cardboard House Press

2023

Cartonera edition with letterpress covers, handmade in Spanish-bilingual bookmaking workshops

> Order

Excerpts
Hormone of Darkness, Poetry Daily, September 8, 2023
Three Poems, Latin American Literature Today, November 2020

Reviews
Diego Báez @ Letras Latinas Blog
Katherine M. Hedeen @ Action Books Micro-Reviews of Poetry in Translation
Greg Bem @ Hopscotch Translation

Interview
‘Traduzco a poetas mujeres para cambiar el canon’: Entrevista en Lima en Escena, September 2023

Photo credit: Ryan Greene at Shut Eye Press in Phoenix, AZ. Book design by Mutandis.

Essays

Profiting in Nowhereland
Boston Review, November 2025
The sordid histories behind Texas’s new industrial-scale immigration detention center, Camp East Montana.

Post Colonialism
Boston Review, September 2024
Along a recently designated historic trail on the U.S.-Mexico border, colonial legacies hide in plain sight.

Sobre la poesía documental: un intertexto con Giancarlo Huapaya, Jose Antonio Villarán y Honora Spicer
Pesapalabra 9, July 2024 (PDF)

Spitting Sutures
Asymptote, July 2024

A poetics of proximity , Jacket2 Commentary Series: Architectures of Disappearance, February 2022

Orienting to Im/mobility , Jacket2 Commentary Series: Architectures of Disappearance, September 2021

ICE deportation flights continue out of El Paso airport despite COVID-19, El Paso Matters, May 2020

Closing Nazareth: On Shelter, The Rumpus, May 2019

Poetry

A Spatial Formula & POST BOND folio, The Georgia Review, forthcoming

'Hawkins Boulevard' from POST BOND, Tripwire Journal 18: Achive Fervor, September 2021

Poems in Translation

from The Ages by Teresa Cabrera, translated by Honora Spicer
A Perfect Vacuum, July 2023
Tripwire 20, July 2024

Reviews of Poetry & Translation

Honora Spicer

> Historian, poet, literary translator

> Ph.D. candidate in History at Harvard University researching physical and textual infrastructures of the U.S. state

> Writing POST BOND: El Paso and the Infrastructure of Empire, 1845-1967

> Associate Editor, Cardboard House Press

> des/centro de poesía
language justice project in Providence, RI

CV

Photo credit: Gianca Huapaya

News &
Recent / Upcoming Events

> Tripwire: Transnational Poetics
New Orleans Poetry Festival
Saturday, April 18, 2026, 4pm

> Shitholes of the World, Unite: A Reading of Poetry in Translation
New Orleans Poetry Festival
Friday, April 17, 2026, 1pm

> Cardboard House Press @ New Orleans Poetry Festival Book Fair
April 17-19, 2026

> Cardboard House Press @ RISD Unbound Art Book Fair
Fleet Library, Providence, RI
April 11, 2026

> Cardboard House Press @ Multiple Formats Art Book Fair
Boston, MA
March 21, 2026

> Infrastructures of Empire
Roundtable with Erika Bsumek, Alyssa Kreikemeier and Lois Rosson
American Society for Environmental History Conference
Kansas City
March 26, 2026

> Cardboard House Press @ AWP Bookfair
Baltimore, MD
March 5-7, 2026

> Histories of Documentalities in El Paso
Guest Lecture @ University of Texas at El Paso
February 16, 2026

Research Areas

> 19th and 20th-century United States history

> Borderlands, immigration & carceral geography

> Infrastructure & urban history

> Documentary poetry

> Cartography & counter-mapping

Teaching

> What does it mean to know where and when we are?

> Orienting to time and place

> Experiential education

> Place-based history

> Counter-mapping in Poetry, 2022-2025
Workshop series in collaboration with Giancarlo Huapaya
With support from: Harvard University Mellon Urban Initiative, EPCC/UTEP Mellon Humanities Collaborative, des/centro de poesía

In this poetry workshop, we investigate visual and textual forms of representing spaces at the intersection of poetry and cartography. Grounded in the visual/textual practice of poets and artists from the Latin American avant-garde, concrete poetry, documentary poetry, and critical cartography, we will excavate accumulations of power in public spaces to understand how what we can see has been formed, and how that formation affects our perception here and now. This workshop is designed for poets interested in integrating new tools, literary traditions, and spatial and ethical orientations in their practice, and to develop an investigative project about a place with which they are in relation. The workshop will be facilitated in Spanish and English, but participants do not need to be bilingual.

Below: Reading artists’ books and counter-maps in the Harvard Map Collection, 2023

> Teaching Fellow in the Harvard University Department of History, 2022-2024
Borders; What is Urban History?; What is Legal History?

> El Paso Community College History Instructor, 2020-2022
United States History

> Mellon Humanities Collaborative Faculty Fellow, 2021-2022
Carceral Geography in El Paso, TX: Creating Soundwalks to Experience Disappeared Histories

Below: Public humanities walking event near ICE detention facility on Montana Ave., El Paso, TX, 2022

>Place-based United States History, 2021-2022
Online and experiential course

> Hurricane Island Outward Bound School Lead Instructor in Backpacking, Flat water and Whitewater Canoeing & Rock Climbing, Seasonally 2011-2021
357 field days leading wilderness expeditions with young adults

Below: Teaching River Reading on the Androscoggin River, Hurricane Island Outward Bound School, Maine, 2019

Contact

hspicer@fas.harvard.edu

Last Updated 24.10.31