DEFA is presently curating an art exhibit entitled "The American Dream: The Latino Experience in America,” to be shown at the Belskie Museum of Art, in Closter, New Jersey, in April, 2018. 

It is a thrill to watch writer/director Melanie Maria Goodreaux in her element, shining in a theater, flitting about a stage, cackling, making her universe. In Enough VO5 for the Universe you get to see her giant, hilarious brain in action.

She’s 9 months old. 
We’re taking a bath.
6 months ago I cupped her body
And her smile whooshed
In bathwater waves
Now she’s in a rush
To stand and doesn’t like
Getting her hair wet.

Lynn Crawford has what might be considered a quirky, oddball approach, which makes it seem  the author is swimming far from the mainstream. However, at second glance, it turns out this approach leads straight to an unsurpassed understanding of American reality.

Don't scream
Be serene

Watching Carl Sagan Cosmos
With Maitri
Trying to stand on my thighs
we're rocking back and forth
In the rocking chair
Suddenly I'm afraid

The winds are sweeping across America.
The flags are shredding on their poles.
The dogs are barking at the sunsets,
and the coals are burning down.

“Kill Jay-Z,” raps Jay-Z in the first line of the first song of his newest album, the cryptically titled 4:44 (some have read it as a reference to Obama, the 44th president)

Meet the Carters, the family at the center of Angie Thomas’ searing and topical YA novel, The Hate U Give

“The walls were covered with a pink-flowered Lucca damask, patterned with birds and dotted with dainty blossoms of silver…” (Oscar Wilde, “The Birthday of the Infanta,” The House of Pomegranates)

As the United States enters another season of racial tension across the country, the movie Mudbound shines a light on the evils of the Jim Crow era in Mississippi during World War II.

Los Angeles is the home of championship teams, beaches, A-list stars and a place where people move to make dreams come true.

Check out Tribes headquarters new digs! 

If not for the police barricades currently surrounding it, the J. Marion Sims statue on the East side of Central Park and 103rd street could serve as a portrait of urban serenity to unknowing passerby.

An astronaut launches into space on a solo mission: to penetrate a mysterious purple cloud (Chopra) that has mysteriously arrived in our part of the universe and is casting a strange purple pall over Earth’s night skies.

In a cold time, in a place accustomed more
To scorching heat than cold, to the flatness of plain,
Than hills: A child was born in a cave to save the world.
And it stormed, as only winter desert storms can.