Matters of the Sea / Cosas del mar

Matters of the Sea / Cosas del mar
Author: Richard Blanco
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 34
Release: 2015-09-03
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0822981262

Matters of the Sea / Cosas del mar is a commemorative bilingual chapbook that beautifully reproduces Richard Blanco's stirring poem presented during the historic reopening ceremony of the United States Embassy in Havana, Cuba, on August 14, 2015.

Let's Hear Their Voices

Let's Hear Their Voices
Author: Iraida H. López
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2019-12-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1438477090

The first anthology of poetry, prose, and drama by second-generation Cuban American writers. Let’s Hear Their Voices brings together works by ten distinguished and emerging Cuban American writers of the “second generation”—writers who were born between 1960 and the mid-1980s in the United States to Cuban parents or have a mixed ethnic background. Called “ABCs” (American-Born Cubans) or“AmeriCubans,” these writers experiment with different formal approaches and lace their work with Cuban Spanish to give voice to hybrid identities and cultural legacies within the contemporary multicultural United States. An introduction by Iraida H. López identifies key tropes in their poetry, prose, and drama, and provides an overview of Cuban American literature since the 1960s. With both original and previously published pieces by award-winning authors—including President Obama’s Second Inaugural Poet, Richard Blanco—the volume makes a welcome contribution to the fields of Latinx and American literature, as well as critical discussions across disciplines about the intersections of latinidad with race, class, gender, and sexuality. “The selections chosen are excellent across the board. Collectively, they give a sense of the directions in which second-generation Cuban American writing is moving, as well as of its abiding concern with the country of origin of the first generation. The writing is impressive, strong, and compelling.” — Marta Caminero-Santangelo, University of Kansas

Pride and Joy

Pride and Joy
Author: Kathleen Archambeau
Publisher: Mango Media Inc.
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2017-06-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1633535517

A collection sharing stories of success, happiness, and inspiration from the LGBTQ+ community. In Pride and Joy, award-winning writer and longtime LGBTQ+ activist Kathleen Archambeau tells the untold stories from diverse queer voices around the world. Not like the depressing, sinister, shadowy stories of the past, this book highlights queer people living open, happy, fulfilling, and successful lives. Inside, learn why Tony Kushner quit cello and how Colm Toibin found his voice, why Emma Donoghue calls her experience a fluke and the best advice Bill T. Jones got was from his mother, and also how being an inaugural poet changed Richard Blanco’s life and how Ugandan activist “LongJones” escaped death threats and gained asylum. But you will also see other stories, like the bravery of a Uruguayan author who was rejected by her immediate family even as she began a family of her own. Be inspired by the audacity to fight for justice that motivates National Center for Lesbian Rights Executive Director Kate Kendell, a Mormon who grew up in Utah. Learn how two couples transcend time and distance to finally be together and how one NBA sports executive summoned the courage to come out. Discover the message of love from the first openly lesbian United Methodist Church Bishop. Learn the secrets of a successful, out IBM executive based in London and the rewards of Ballroom Basix founder in Harlem. See how the Maori philosophy of whanau guided the MP who won marriage rights in New Zealand and how high expectations overcame disability and bullying for an acclaimed mezzo-soprano. Meet the professional violinist and composer impacted by family tensions and the Armenian Genocide. Read about the ballroom dancers and Hungarian activists on neo-Nazi “hit lists.” Pride & Joy shows why there is hope it gets better for everyone in the queer community, including: The transgender choreographer and dancer who continues to break rules and enlighten audiences The Dutch singer, songwriter and independent theater producer who breaks down stereotypes The founder of an award-winning smoking cessation program The California political director of the Obama re-election campaign The Russian émigré award-winning computer scientist and the Chinese folk dancer

Let's Hear Their Voices

Let's Hear Their Voices
Author: Iraida H. López
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2019-12-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1438477104

Let's Hear Their Voices brings together works by ten distinguished and emerging Cuban American writers of the "second generation"—writers who were born between 1960 and the mid-1980s in the United States to Cuban parents or have a mixed ethnic background. Called "ABCs" (American-Born Cubans) or "AmeriCubans," these writers experiment with different formal approaches and lace their work with Cuban Spanish to give voice to hybrid identities and cultural legacies within the contemporary multicultural United States. An introduction by Iraida H. López identifies key tropes in their poetry, prose, and drama, and provides an overview of Cuban American literature since the 1960s. With both original and previously published pieces by award-winning authors—including President Obama's Second Inaugural Poet, Richard Blanco—the volume makes a welcome contribution to the fields of Latinx and American literature, as well as critical discussions across disciplines about the intersections of latinidad with race, class, gender, and sexuality.

The American Poet Laureate

The American Poet Laureate
Author: Amy Paeth
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2023-05-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231550790

The American Poet Laureate shows how the state has been the silent center of poetic production in the United States since World War II. It is the first history of the national poetry office, the U.S. poet laureate, highlighting the careers of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Pinsky, Tracy K. Smith, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Joy Harjo at the nation’s Capitol. It is also a history of how these state poets participated in national arts programming during the Cold War. Drawing on previously unexplored archival materials at the Library of Congress and materials at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Amy Paeth describes the interactions of federal bodies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the National Endowment for the Arts, with literary organizations and with private patrons, including “Prozac heiress” Ruth Lilly. The consolidation of public and private interests is crucial to the development of state verse culture, recognizable at the first National Poetry Festival in 1962, which followed Robert Frost’s “Mission to Moscow,” and which became dominant in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The American Poet Laureate contributes to a growing body of institutional and sociological approaches to U.S. literary production in the postwar era and demonstrates how poetry has played a uniquely important, and largely underacknowledged, role in the cultural front of the Cold War.

Water Graves

Water Graves
Author: Valérie Loichot
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2020-01-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813943809

Water Graves considers representations of lives lost to water in contemporary poetry, fiction, theory, mixed-media art, video production, and underwater sculptures. From sunken slave ships to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Valérie Loichot investigates the lack of official funeral rites in the Atlantic, the Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico, waters that constitute both early and contemporary sites of loss for the enslaved, the migrant, the refugee, and the destitute. Unritual, or the privation of ritual, Loichot argues, is a state more absolute than desecration. Desecration implies a previous sacred observance--a temple, a grave, a ceremony. Unritual, by contrast, denies the sacred from the beginning. In coastal Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Miami, Haiti, Martinique, Cancun, and Trinidad and Tobago, the artists and writers featured in Water Graves—an eclectic cast that includes Beyoncé, Radcliffe Bailey, Edwidge Danticat, Édouard Glissant, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jason deCaires Taylor, Édouard Duval-Carrié, Natasha Trethewey, and Kara Walker, among others—are an archipelago connected by a history of the slave trade and environmental vulnerability. In addition to figuring death by drowning in the unritual—whether in the context of the aftermath of slavery or of ecological and human-made catastrophes—their aesthetic creations serve as memorials, dirges, tombstones, and even material supports for the regrowth of life underwater.

The Whole Island

The Whole Island
Author: Mark Weiss
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 621
Release: 2009-11-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0520258940

Cuba's cultural influence throughout the Western Hemisphere, and especially in the United States, has been disproportionally large for so small a country. This landmark volume is the first comprehensive overview of poetry written over the past sixty years. Presented in a beautiful Spanish-English en face edition, The Whole Island makes available the astonishing achievement of a wide range of Cuban poets, including such well-known figures as Nicolás Guillén, José Lezama Lima, and Nancy Morejón, but also poets widely read in Spanish who remain almost unknown to the English-speaking world—among them Fina García Marruz, José Kozer, Raúl Hernández Novás, and Ángel Escobar—and poets born since the Revolution, like Rogelio Saunders, Omar Pérez, Alessandra Molina, and Javier Marimón. The translations, almost all of them new, convey the intensity and beauty of the accompanying Spanish originals. With their work deeply rooted in Cuban culture, many of these poets—both on and off the island—have been at the center of the political and social changes of this tempestuous period. The poems offered here constitute an essential source for understanding the literature and culture of Cuba, its diaspora, and the Caribbean at large, and provide an unparalleled perspective on what it means to be Cuban.

I Explain a Few Things

I Explain a Few Things
Author: Pablo Neruda
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2015-09-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1466894520

"Laughter is the language of the soul," Pablo Neruda said. Among the most lasting voices of the most tumultuous (in his own words, "the saddest") century, a witness and a chronicler of its most decisive events, he is the author of more than thirty-five books of poetry and one of Latin America's most revered writers, the emblem of the engaged poet, an artist whose heart, always with the people, is literally consumed by passion. His work, oscillating from epic meditations on politics and history to intimate reflections on animals, food, and everyday objects, is filled with humor and affection. This bilingual selection of more than fifty of Neruda's best poems, edited and with an introduction by the distinguished Latin American scholar Ilan Stavans and brilliantly translated by an array of well-known poets, also includes some poems previously unavailable in English. I Explain a Few Things distills the poet's brilliance to its most essential and illuminates Neruda's commitment to using the pen as a calibrator for his age.

Central America in My Heart

Central America in My Heart
Author: Oscar Gonzales
Publisher: Bilingual Review Press (AZ)
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2007
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:

In Central America in My Heart/Centro Am?rica en el coraz?n, Gonzales expresses nostalgia for the beauty of his native Honduras, sharing his passion and sense of loss. Vacillating between rage and undying love, Gonzales's poems express his deep cultural appreciation for the people of his homeland while he reveals their struggles and berates a corrupt and unjust political and economic system. Inspired by Pablo Neruda, Roberto Sosa, and Jorge Luis Borges, Gonzales hopes to lessen the antipathy within Honduras and awaken a social consciousness through his poems, which are presented in both Spanish and English. Gonzales was awarded Yale University's coveted Theron Rockwell Field Prize in 1991 for his anthology of poems Donde el plomo flota (Where Lead Floats). He was the first undergraduate to receive the award.

Harmony and Normalization

Harmony and Normalization
Author: Timothy P. Storhoff
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2020-10-21
Genre: Music
ISBN: 149683089X

Harmony and Normalization: US-Cuban Musical Diplomacy explores the channels of musical exchange between Cuba and the United States during the eight-year presidency of Barack Obama, who eased the musical embargo of the island and restored relations with Cuba. Musical exchanges during this period act as a lens through which to view not only US-Cuban musical relations but also the larger political, economic, and cultural implications of musical dialogue between these two nations. Policy shifts in the wake of Raúl Castro assuming the Cuban presidency and the election of President Obama allowed performers to traverse the Florida Straits more easily than in the recent past and encouraged them to act as musical ambassadors. Their performances served as a testing ground for political change that anticipated normalized relations. While government actors debated these changes, music forged connections between individuals on both sides of the Florida Straits. In this first book on the subject since Obama’s presidency, musicologist Timothy P. Storhoff describes how, after specific policy changes, musicians were some of the first to take advantage of new opportunities for travel, push the boundaries of new regulations, and expose both the possibilities and limitations of licensing musical exchange. Through the analysis of both official and unofficial musical diplomacy efforts, including the Havana Jazz Festival, the National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba’s first US tour, the Minnesota Orchestra’s trip to Havana, and the author’s own experiences in Cuba, this ethnography demonstrates how performances reflect aspirations for stronger transnational ties and a common desire to restore the once-thriving US-Cuban musical relationship.