Marcella is a farmer, beekeeper and an award-winning writer and educator.

“Pan de Alma is a celebration of ancestry, identity, and the spiritual communion between place and self. Each poem is both an offering and a revelation, grounded in Prokop’s Colombian inheritance. “Bursting with impermanence” and clarity of vision from “the chipped bowls / from abuelita’s kitchen” or staring into “Omayra’s eyes,” which bear “the vacuum of collapsed stars / and Colombia’s shifting soil.” These lines, like so many, echo with generations of sacrifice and quiet persistence. What emerges is a reckoning and reverent embrace of “the in-between of existence, / the hyphen, the middle” that is “both victory and loss.” It’s this liminality that becomes Prokop’s most compelling element, as she writes “a communion of the US and Colombia” in glowing, spiritual language that is at once intimate and political. Pan de Alma is a vessel filled with memory, faith, and hard-won love.”