Join us for a celebration of three writers that helped shape our literary and cultural traditions inside and outside academia. Each writer will be in conversation with a younger writer/scholar familiar with their work and trajectory.
Panelists
John Rechy is the recipient of two coveted Lifetime Achievement Awards: PEN-USA-West’s 1997 Lifetime Achievement Award and The Publishing Triangle’s William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. In September 2000, a CD-Rom of his life and works--"Memories and Desire: The Worlds of John Rechy" (produced through the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California)--debuted at the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles to an overflow crowd. Last August, Rechy's eagerly awaited novel The Coming of the Night was published by Grove/Atlantic and appeared as # 2 on the Los Angeles Time's Bestseller List. His 12th novel marks the author's return to some of the scenes and themes of his now-classic first novel, City of Night. The paperback edition was released in September 2000.
Alex Espinoza is the author of Still Water Saints, The Five Acts of Diego León, and Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime. He’s written for the LA Times, the NY Times Magazine, VQR, LitHub, and NPR's All Things Considered. The recipient of fellowships from the NEA and MacDowell as well as an American Book Award, he lives in Los Angeles and is the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at UC-Riverside.
Rhina P. Espaillat has published ten full-length books and three chapbooks, comprising poetry, essays, and short stories, in both English and her native Spanish, and translations from and into both languages. Her work appears in many journals, anthologies, and websites, and has earned national and international awards, including the T. S. Eliot Prize in Poetry, the Richard Wilbur Award, the Howard Nemerov Prize, the May Sarton Award, the Robert Frost “Tree at My Window” Prize for translation, several honors from the New England Poetry Club, the Poetry Society of America, the Ministry of Culture of the Dominican Republic, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Salem State College.
Nancy Kang is an Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Canada Research Chair in Transnational Feminisms and Gender-Based Violence at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. She co-authored The Once and Future Muse: The Poetry and Poetics of Rhina P. Espaillat (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018) with Silvio Torres-Saillant. The text won Honorable Mention in 2021 from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW) for Best Book (published between 2017-2020). In 2020, she was the inaugural winner of the Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award in Poetry and received the Guy Alexandre Paper Prize from the Haitian and Dominican Studies section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).
Victor Hernández Cruz was born in the town of Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico. A mountainous zone dedicated to the agriculture of tobacco and café. His family migrated to New York City when he was five years old. As an adolescent he started writing poems and self published a mimeograph book of poems, which was picked up by Fred Jordan, editor of the Evergreen Review. Jordan published the booklet in a 1967 issue of the magazine, blasting the young poet’s work nationally and internationally. In 1969, Random House published his first major book of poetry called Snaps, followed by his book Mainland. Early on he was influenced by the Beat poets and by the New York group of Poets known as Umbra. Later, he was attracted to the work of Charles Olson and the Black Mountain School of poets, which included Edward Dorn and Robert Duncan. Edward Dorn was a lifetime friend. In the 80s, Hernandez Cruz did a national tour with poet Robert Creeley, another important Black Mountain poet. Hernandez Cruz’s poems have been translated into Turkish, French, Russian, Chinese, Greek, and Japanese, among other languages. Coffee House has been his publisher for over 25 years, having published his works In The Shadow of Al-Andalus and Beneath The Spanish. Hernandez Cruz currently considers both his native Puerto Rico and Morocco in North Africa as his home.
Urayoán Noel is the author of In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press) and eight books of poetry, including Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico and Transversal, both with the University of Arizona Press. As a translator of Latin American poetry, he has been a finalist for the National Translation Award and the Best Translated Book Award. His international performances include Poesiefestival Berlin, Barcelona Poesia, and the Toronto Biennial of Art, and his work has been selected for exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, and Taller Boricua. Originally from Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, Noel lives in the Bronx and teaches at New York University.
Event Recap
Watch the full recording below!
Pictured above: Nancy Kang with Rhina P. Espaillat, Alex Espinoza with John Rechy, and Urayoán Noel with Victor Hernández Cruz.