Celebrating the Ancestors of Latino Poetry in New York: A Conversation and Performance
Date: November 8, 2024 @ 6:30 - 8:00 PM
Location: The Center for Brooklyn History
128 Pierrepont St, Brooklyn, NY 11201
More info and RSVP HERE!
The Clemente and Brooklyn Public Library, in partnership with the Library of America, are proud to present a series of three events this fall celebrating the NYC launch of Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, edited by celebrated poet Rigoberto González. The series will engage new audiences through music, poetry, and performances.
This series debuts the first thematic track for Historias Sembradas, Everyday Poetics: Ritual and Resistance, which explores the role Latinx poets have played a vital role in shaping diasporic identity, institution building, and community organizing.
The work of New York poets José Martí, Salomón de la Selva, Julia de Burgos, Lourdes Casal, and Clemente Soto Vélez has shaped today’s thriving Latino Poetic tradition and our understanding of what it means to be American. These revolutionary voices represent a range of Latin American geographies and aesthetics, including themes of migration, anti-imperialism, latinidad, language and exile. Join us as we explore the lasting impact of their voices in a multi-dimensional program offered in celebration of the publication of the landmark anthology Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology.
The event will feature a panel moderated by Latino Poetry contributor Edwin Torres with two scholars of Latino poetry in New York—Laura Lomas (Rutgers University-Newark) and Urayoán Noel (New York University). Torres will then lead an eight-person Poets Choir through an experimental performance of poems from the anthology in English and Spanish by all five of these poetic ancestors.
Participants:
Laura Lomas teaches comparative American studies, Latina/o/x literature and culture, ethnic and immigrant literature of the United States and the Americas, women's writing, nineteenth century studies, and feminist and decolonial theory in the English Department and the Graduate Program in American Studies at Rutgers University, Newark. Lomas is author of Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects and American Modernities which received the Modern Language Association's Prize for best book in Chicana and Chicano and Latina and Latino Studies. She co-edited The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature. She has served as Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program, co-founded the Latina/o Studies Working Group, co-founded the Immigrant rights Collective, and was Founding Faculty Director of a graduate level Cuba study abroad program at Rutgers University-Newark. She also serves on the Advisory Board of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, and on the Editorial Boards of Pasados, Hostos Review, and of Periférica: Journal of Social, Cultural and Literary History.
Urayoán Noel is a 2022 Letras Boricuas fellow and the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Transversal, a New York Public Library Book of the Year. Other work includes the LASA award-winning study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam, the durational performance Wokitokiteki, and, as translator, adjacent islands by Nicole Cecilia Delgado. Noel lives in the Bronx and teaches at NYU.
Edwin Torres is a NYC native and editor of The Body In Language: An Anthology. Poetry collections include; Quanundrum: i will be your many angled thing (American Book Award winner), Xoeteox: the infinite word object, and Ameriscopia. Multi-disciplinary collaborations with a wide range of cultural nomads have contributed to the development of his bodylingo poetics. He has performed worldwide and received fellowships from NYSCA, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Arts Mid-Hudson, and The DIA Foundation among others. Anthologies include; Latino Poetry, New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archives, In The 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement, and Aloud: Voices from The Nuyorican Poets Cafe. He is currently an adjunct poetry professor at Columbia University.
Poets Choir:
Darrel Alejandro Holnes is the author of Stepmotherland and Migrant Psalms, Holnes is an Associate Professor at Medgar Evers College and a faculty member at NYU and the CUNY Grad Center.
Lydia Cortés is the author of the poetry collections Lust for Lust and Whose Place. Her work also has been published in various anthologies including, Puerto Rican Poetry From Aboriginal Times to the Present, Resist Much, Obey Little and Breaking Ground: Anthology of Puerto Rican Women Writers in New York.
Sheila Maldonado is the author of the poetry collections that's what you get and one-bedroom solo. She is a CantoMundo fellow and a Creative Capital awardee as part of desveladas, a visual writing collective. She teaches English for the City University of New York.
E.J. McAdams is a poet, artist, and collaborator exploring language and mark-making in the urban environment using procedures and improvisation with found and natural materials. He has published five chapbooks and curated the Social-Environmental-Aesthetics reading at EXIT ART. His first full-length collection is LAST.
Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet & a daughter of immigrants. Her work has been published in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast and in Best of American Poetry. Her first collection is The Pink Box. Her second collection Muse Found in a Colonized Body, was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award.
Urayoán Noel is a 2022 Letras Boricuas fellow and the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Transversal, a New York Public Library Book of the Year. Other work includes the LASA award-winning study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam, the durational performance Wokitokiteki, and, as translator, adjacent islands by Nicole Cecilia Delgado.
K(Kristin) Prevallet is a poet, scholar, somatic practitioner, and performer. She is the author of six books including Everywhere Here and in Brooklyn, I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time. She teaches for Bard College's Prison Initiative and is a poet in residence for The Poetry Clinic (trancepoetics.com).
Emanuel Xavier is author of several poetry books including Selected Poems of Emanuel Xavier and Love(ly) Child. His books have been finalists for International Latino Book Awards and Lambda Literary Awards and his work has appeared in Poetry, A Gathering of the Tribes, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere.