Today we’d like to introduce you to Didi Menendez.
Didi, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I started publishing online in the late ’90s. The publication was a take-off of a retro magazine from Cuba called Bohemia. It went out of print during the Revolution.
My family came from Cuba in 1962 and I always had a fascination with magazines but I never pursued a career in publishing until I found myself divorced with four children all under the age of 8. The internet offered me a creative companionship and the opportunity to learn code and publish online. I wasn’t sure what type of magazine I wanted to publish so I thought it should be something along the lines of my history and literature. So, I started publishing La Bohemia in 1999. However, because of the early days of publishing online, I had some problems resolving an issue with a server and had to come up quick with a different domain.
I somehow got involved in poetry. I was writing and publishing mostly poetry and in the struggle to come up with a new domain, I came up with MiPOesias which later I was told it was a typo because the correct way to say “my poems” in Spanish should have been “mis poesias”. The community couldn’t pronounce the new name so they started calling it MIPO.
MiPOesias took off and several poems ended up in Best American Poetry (www.bestamericanpoetry.com). When print-on-demand options became available, the magazine became a real life glossy publication and I had a handsome poet on the cover Miguel Murphy and it was designed professionally by one of my friends in Los Angeles, April Carter-Grant.
I decided I wanted to have artwork in the magazine but since MiPOesias was centered around poetry, I bought a new domain, poetsandartists.com. The rest is history.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
The struggles I had along the way most were financial. I maintained the upkeep of the publications from my nine to five paycheck. Also, the software which I had been using to create the publication online went out of production and I had to learn new publishing software to keep up with the demands of the internet. I spent a lot of hours racking my brain late into the evening learning and I had to do it quickly. Every week there seemed to be something new.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with PoetsArtists – tell our readers more, for example, what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
What sets PoetsArtists (www.poetsandartists.com) apart from the others is our strong community. It consists of artists, poets, and art collectors. It has become more than just a publication. We are now exhibiting not only at the Zhou B Art Center in Chicago but also in other cities and next year we are exhibiting in Ireland. One of our artists and art professor, Conor Walton, is curating our show at Gromley’s Gallery.
This year, for the first time, we are exhibiting in a new museum which opened up last year in Wisconsin, the Wausau Museum Of Contemporary Art.
We are curating one of the most important figurative exhibitions in the USA and it is being held in the Midwest, PAINTING THE FIGURE NOW. This exhibition includes masters such as Margaret Bowland, F. Scott Hess, Eloy Morales, Jaime Valero, Rebecca Leveille, Tim Okamura, Victor Wang and many others. Sometimes, I can’t believe it myself.
We just had a great exhibition at the Zhou B Art Center this past April. It was curated by Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt. She and her husband Steven Alan Bennett just recently launched an art prize for females. The Bennett Prize (https://thebennettprize.org/) is awarding $50,000 to a woman artist to create her own solo exhibition of figurative realist paintings, which will travel the country.
Steven Alan Bennett and Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt will be curating an exhibition again next year at the Zhou B Art Center. The show will be focused on diptychs. Find out more about how to submit here: https://www.poetsandartists.com/submission-calls-1/2018/3/23/secondary-meanings-figural-diptychs
So, what’s next? Any big plans?
I think most of the changes have happened this year when I finally opened up a Patreon (www.patreon.com/didimenendez) for our tribe. It has allowed some funds to come in and help with my creative projects. I have been publishing all these years without any funds other than what I could squeeze out of my paycheck and now we finally have some wiggle room.
With Patreon, I can concentrate on our artists’ careers and help them with social media, publishing, applying for grants, finding representation, preparing submissions, and more importantly finding homes for their artwork.
I was able to bring in my daughter Jay Menendez to help and she is now overseeing much of the daily ins and out of publishing, so I can come up with our next big adventure.
Contact Info:
- Address: PoetsArtists, Bloomington, Illinois Zhou B Art Center, Chicago, IL
- Website: www.poetsandartists.com
- Phone: 309-838-6657
- Email: didimenendez@gmail.com
- Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/poetsartists
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/poetsartists
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/didimenendez
- Other: http://www.patreon.com/didimenendez
Image Credit:
The Zhou B Art Center, Chicago, paintings by Matthew Ivan Cherry, Jay Menendez, Debra Balchen, Victoria Selbach, Didi Menendez, Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt, Steven Alan Bennett, Howard Tullman, Jason Alexander
Getting in touch: VoyageChicago is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
