Every Day is Magic: Ada Limón
In her 2015 collection, Bright Dead Things, a National Book Award finalist for poetry, Ada Limón writes of moving to Kentucky: “Confession: I did not want to live here.” It’s perhaps not a surprising sentiment coming from a coastally oriented person who was raised in Northern California, attended college in Seattle, and then spent over a decade in New York City.
But Limón and her husband, Lucas, have been in Lexington for seven years now and the effects of settling into this place are noticeable in her new book, The Carrying (Milkweed, Aug.). It’s a phenomenally lively and attentive collection replete with the trappings of living a little closer to nature. While Bright Dead Things is marked by a preponderance of light, such as images of fireflies and neon signs, The Carrying features numerous appearances by various trees, birds, and beetles. Limón also demonstrates a greater willingness to be explicit in naming colors, particularly green. “It’s crazy green, the whole book,” she says. “Lexington is the greenest place I’ve ever lived.” Similarly, where in Bright Dead Things, Limón tells a lot of stories and anecdotes, in The Carrying she is very present in her thoughts and experiences.
As it turns out, these shifts in focus have another, altogether unexpected source. While putting Bright Dead Things together, Limón was diagnosed with chronic vestibular neuronitis, which can cause bouts of vertigo. “If I’m really having vertigo, it’s pretty intense and I really have to focus,”
Read More…
Don Quixote rides anew (on a bicycle!) in Cal Shakes world premiere
“…Brandishing a bedpan as a helmet and reclaimed auto parts as a coat of armor, a bedraggled “Quixote Nuevo” charges on stage at Cal Shakes atop a rickety bicycle instead of a steed.
Octavio Solis’ cheeky new re-imagining of Cervantes’ Don Quixote mythology, exuberantly directed by KJ Sanchez, throbs with wit and poignancy in its world premiere at California Shakespeare Theater in Orinda. Letting acclaimed playwright Solis (“El Paso Blue,” “Santos and Santos”) rub elbows with Shakespeare on the docket is part of Cal Shakes’ mission to redefine the classics in a more inclusive and relevant way that speaks to the soul and politics of life in America today…”
Link to article
Gary Soto: Storyteller from the Barrio
Gary Soto came from a hard background by anyone’s reckoning. His young father died in an industrial accident when Gary was only five years old. His Mexican-American family was struggling and lived in a tough neighborhood–next to a junkyard and across from a pickle factory. All through school, he and his family worked at whatever jobs they could get, including picking fruits as migrant laborers.
His grades were never very good, and his family never encouraged reading. That just wasn’t part of their culture, what Gary referred to as the culture of poverty. In high school, he had a D average and was better known for being popular with the girls. Other kids in his place might have gone to prison, but he went to college. He had finally developed a love for books after reading To Sir, with Love, a story about an inner-city teacher…
Link to article
Indigenous Poetry in Contemporary Mexico: Voices, Translations, Cultures
Event Date:
Thursday, April 5, 2018 – 12:30pm to 1:30pm
Event Contact:
Lety Garcia, Programs and PR Manager
805-893-2951 or lgarcia@museum.ucsb.edu
As part of the Conference “Verbal Kaleidoscope” hosted by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, several contemporary poets from Mexico, including the renowned Mazatec poet and Director of the Mexican Institute of Indigenous Languages (INALI), Juan Gregorio Regino, and prominent Zapotec poet Irma Pineda Santiago will read from their work written in indigenous languages (including their own translations into Spanish and English). This is a great opportunity to listen to these new voices that are re-defining the literary landscape of Latin America today…
Link to announcement
A family saga with bounding heart, poetic delivery and plenty of swagger
Luis Alberto Urrea’s “The House of Broken Angels” is a big, sprawling, messy, sexy, raucous house party of a book, a pan-generational family saga with an enormous, bounding heart, a poetic delivery and plenty of swagger. It’s not perfect — in fact, even its flaws are big — but it stays with you, and it stands as a vital reminder of the value of fiction in defining the immigrant experience…
Link to article
The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border, reviews
“It is a lament for what a broken immigration system does to families, and its final third is a riveting, heartbreaking exploration of one such case … His lyrical asides about the border, from the history of its creation to quotations of poets who’ve written about it, are passionately delivered and speak to his urge to give nameless migrants an identity. But he spends less time scrutinizing the institutions that create the namelessness. His discussion of the Mexican government’s bloody escalation of the war against the cartels only glancingly mentions the U.S. government’s implication in it or the way border crackdowns only made crossing the border more expensive and risky. The imperfection of Cantú’s approach, though, mirrors the messiness of the crisis he’s facing.”…
Link to reviews
TRAMBLEY, ESTELA PORTILLO
(1926–1998). Estela Portillo Trambley, teacher and feminist author of books, poems, essays, and plays, was born on January 16, 1926, in El Paso, Texas. She was the oldest child of Francisco Portillo and Delphina (Fierro) Portillo. Her father was a mechanic, and her mother was a piano teacher, but Estela spent a considerable amount of her childhood with her grandparents, Julian and Luz Fierro, who were listed in a neighboring household on the 1930 census. Her grandfather was the proprietor of a store in the barrio. She maintained a positive attitude regarding the poverty that she witnessed as a child and later stated that “la pobreza nunca derriba el espiritu” (poverty never defeats the spirit). Growing up, Estela Portillo had a love for literature and was an avid reader. During her formative years, her diverse reading materials included English and American classics, poetry, and philosophy. She attended El Paso High School…
Link to short biography
The Jewish-American Writer Who Transformed U.S.-Mexico Relations
The Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles is currently highlighting the life and writing of Anita Brenner, a Mexican-born, American Jewish writer. Brenner was born in 1905 in Aguascalientes, and spent the majority of her life writing about the art and culture of Mexico, trying to bridge the gap between the U.S. and Mexico…
Link to article
From La Frontera to La Universidad
An accomplished writer, poet and literary scholar, Norma E. Cantú will receive UCSB’s annual Luis Leal Literature Award…
Link to article
A Nomadic Life Draws Writer To Border Lands, Meet Stephanie Elizondo Griest
Stephanie Elizondo Griest grew up between two cultural identities: her father is white from Kansas, and her mother is Chicana, or Mexican-American.
As a young child she discovered that when she identified as Chicana, she had access to fewer opportunities, and doors that were once open seemed to close. She later spent decades re-discovering Mexican-American culture and fought to highlight the stories of those living at both cultural and physical borders…
Link to article
Carolina Herrera: A woman who broke the rules at the border with Mexico
Carolina Herrera: A Woman Who Broke the Rules at the Border of Mexico weaves a tale of the events that led to the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Carolina’s story is that of the revolution interwoven with a woman whose life was impacted by it. As she was growing up, Carolina had to navigate two cultures—her parents’ Mexican culture, and the mostly American culture she was surrounded with in El Paso, Texas…
“When My Brother Was An Aztec,” by Natalie Diaz
I don’t think people usually take poetry to the beach, but this is different than your normal poetry book. Diaz is a powerhouse of a writer and this book is a wild ride. It has headlong rushes of ecstatic beautiful language, small details about life on Mahovi reservation. Diaz is Mohavi, one of the tribes of the Colorado river. And this is set in Arizona, but it’s also of course set in her heart and her head. There’s a sensibility that is so dark but so funny. It’s a rich, compelling piece of literature. And I would take it to the dock, put it down, and read it again. It’s the kind of book that you want to live with each poem for awhile…
Link to publications
A Man of Letters
Francisco Lomelí is one of the busiest men in Spanish publishing at the moment. The professor of Chicano and Chicana Studies and of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Santa Barbara has three works out now — a reference book on Latino literature, a revised and updated anthology of essays on Aztlán and a magazine of Latino arts and literature…
Link to article
Literary Dynamo
Author of more than 200 publications, books, essays, articles, reviews and short stories, UC Santa Barbara professor Sara Poot-Herrera is known for “always working” — organizing conferences or speaking events on Mexican and Spanish American literature, as well as writing, editing and teaching.
“According to my friends, I don’t sleep,” Poot-Herrera joked. Initially “torn” about missing her apartment and friends in Mexico, she sustains her cultural ties by inviting Mexican writers to speak to her students at UCSB, such as Elmar Mendoza, a key figure in the genre known as narcoliterature — crime fiction. The students, she noted, “were captivated.”…
Link to article
Mexico City
AF IMAGINARY – The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and the …, 2017 – books.google.com
It is inevitable when speaking of Mexico City to speak of it as one of the premier
megalopolises of the world, probably second only to Tokyo in the population of its greater
area. 1 That is, one speaks of the federal capital of the country of Mexico—the Distrito …
Link to book preview
Valentines for all Seasons
A book of love poems by Humberto(Tito)Gutierrez…
Link to book preview
Why This Poet Is Tired Of Trying To Prove He’s Both Mexican And American
n the 1997 film “Selena,” actor Edward James Olmos recited a monologue that resonated with many bicultural Latinos living in the United States. As he put it, being Mexican-American was “tough” because you have to be “more Mexican than the Mexicans, and more American than the Americans, both at the same time.”
And spoken word poet Christopher Martinez personally understands that struggle. The Mexican-American begins his poem, “An Untitled Brown Poem,” with a reference to the iconic words by the actor, who portrayed Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla’ father Abraham in the movie…
Link to article
8 Great Latino Books Published In 2016
As the year comes to a close, here’s one final look at some great Latino books published in 2016.
This list includes titles by U.S. Latino and Latin American authors who have been translated into English. Together, these selections shape a compelling portrait of the Americas as a vibrant territory that welcomes change but holds firm to its ethnic roots and cultural histories…
Link to article
An Honor of Note
Francisco Lomelí had no idea he was being considered for membership in a prestigious organization of Spanish language scholars. And then out of the blue word came that he was in. A professor of Spanish and Portuguese and of Chicana and Chicano studies at UC Santa Barbara, Lomelí was elected as a correspondent to the North American Academy of the Spanish Language. The honor is given to a small number of scholars who have distinguished themselves in their fields. Known by its Spanish acronym ANLE, the academy…
Link to article
Lost and Found
You might say there was something lost in translation when Santa Barbara named a street Canon Perdido. It should have been Cañon Perdido, after a cannon that disappeared on the beach in 1848. Without that Spanish enye Canon Perdido means something entirely different.
That twist of meaning is the theme of “Canon Perdido: XX Colloquium on Mexican Literature,” a three-day conference presented by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Santa Barbara. “We are playing with literary canon that is lost,” explained Sara Poot-Herrera, a professor in the department…
Link to announcement
English graduate student wins Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship
Cesar Soto wants to know how the spark of political revolution can transform religious concepts of community and inclusion.
To better understand the issue, he’s turning to the literature of England, Ireland, and Mexico in the late 1700s and early 1800s.César Soto wants to know how the spark of political revolution can transform religious concepts of community and inclusion.
Soto, a Ph.D. candidate in Notre Dame’s Department of English, has been awarded a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for 2016-17 to support his project.
The fellowships recognize graduate students who have demonstrated superior academic achievement, show promise as future scholars and teachers at a college or university level, and are prepared to use diversity as a resource to enrich the education of all students…
Link to article
