Thank you, Tyler.
Good evening.
As Tyler told you, my name is Laura Villarreal.
And I am a Letras Latinas associate.
My fellow associate is former Poetry Coalition fellow Brent
Ameneyro.
And together, we work with Francisco Aragón, the founding
director of Letras Latinas.
the literary initiative at the University
of Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies.
I'm delighted to be representing Letras Latinas tonight.
Our program this evening is the second installment
of Letras Latinas' year-long 20th anniversary celebration.
And we're so glad to be partnering with the Poetry
Center for this special event.
Our heartfelt thanks to their staff, especially
Paola Valenzuela.
[APPLAUSE]
Our slate of poets this evening, whose work
I'll be commenting on in a moment,
was co-curated by both Francisco and
the former literary director of the Poetry Center, Diana Marie
Delgado.
All three of our poets have previous ties
to Letras Latinas.
For example, Sheila Maldonado was one of our two final judges
of the most recent edition of the Andrés Montoya
Prize, our flagship initiative that
supports the publication of a first book
by a Latinx poet residing in the United States.
A few years ago, Gina Franco was the recipient
of a week-long Letras Latinas ekphrastic poetry
residency in DC.
Edgar Garcia, a couple of years ago,
gave a poetry reading and talk at the University
of Notre Dame, an event whose lead sponsor
was Notre Dame's creative writing program,
a longstanding collaborative partner of Letras Latinas
programs on campus.
In fact, Letras Latinos and the creative writing program
will be joining forces in April to present
Ada Limón, Carmen Giménez, and Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes.
But back to the three poets this evening.
I'm going to read condensed versions of these highly
accomplished writers' bios.
And then they will read, so we can immerse ourselves
in poetry for the remainder of the night.
Our first reader will be Edgar Garcia.
Edgar Garcia was born in California,
to a family of Central American extraction.
He is the author of several books,
both scholarly and creative.
His most recent is a collection of essays
called Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis.
He is an associate professor of English
at the University of Chicago and works
in the fields of Indigenous and Latinx
studies, American literature, poetry, and poetics,
and environmental criticism.
He also teaches in the Department of Creative Writing,
where he serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies.
Garcia's academic background shines
through in his creative work, particularly
in Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography,
a collection of poems and anthropological essays.
He cross-examines history through dream-led verse
and essay.
I say dream-led because he spent each night for four months
reading Christopher Columbus's journal before bed
and transformed his dreams into poetic record the next morning.
The results are fascinatingly fragmented in dream logic,
half remembered histories.
Like most poets, Garcia grapples with the never
ending project of using the past to better understand
the present.
On the topic of time, he wrote, "Time itself,
in the crisis of its inequality, provokes a reckoning."
Our second reader will be Gina Franco.
Gina teaches at Knox College, where
she was awarded the Philip Green Wright/Lombard Prize
for Distinguished Teaching.
Her recent book, The Accidental, winner of the 2019 CantoMundo
Poetry Prize, reflects on accident and its role
in creating the lives we were born into and in determining
how those lives end.
Her first book, The Keepsake Storm,
interrogates the uneasy alliance between the vehemence of memory
and the surrealism of narrative, especially
in light of language, place, faith, and identity.
While her bio contains the subjects of her two books,
I think it's important to emphasize
how intricately detailed and syntactically rich
her poems are.
I am often stunned by the way she
weaves in poetic interjections and questions that redirect
or redefine the poem by creating intentional pauses
for our consideration.
In her latest book, The Accidental,
her poems tend toward questioning language itself.
For instance, she writes, "So how is it done:
the I is seeking in itself where what is already finished
requires the finishing.
The I determined in its I to bring the I forth
and in its own regard and without sacrifice,
the I in conception and realization in equation."
No matter what she writes about, we as readers
are implicated in the verse and asked
to assist the poet in her poems' thinking.
Perhaps this call and response quality
is an artifact of her faith practice.
Franco is an oblate with the community
of Saint John's monastic order.
Our final reader will be Sheila Maldonado.
Sheila Maldonado is the author of the poetry
collections That's What You Get and One Bedroom Solo.
Her poems often embody a restless spirit
that arises from the certainty that life
must be lived on our own terms.
Her line breaks are tuned toward delight and surprise,
as they turn quickly, like the bicycle
wheels in one of my favorite poems by her,
called "Gentry Caffeine II."
Maldonado richly describes the speaker
of the poem riding her bike through New York City
as "Flying, no worry about having no job, or man, or kid,
or expectation, or ambition, just flying, forgetting,
the sun hitting my shoulders."
This feeling of freedom sweeps across the body of her work.
She was born in Brooklyn and raised in Coney Island,
so New York is a prominent feature as well.
Maldonado is a CantoMundo fellow and a Creative Capital awardee
as part of a visual writing collective.
She has served as an artist in residence
on Governors Island for the Lower Manhattan Cultural
Council and a cultural envoy in Honduras
for the US State Department.
She teaches English for the City University of New York.
She lives in El Alto, Manhattan, where
she is working on an ongoing book
project about a lifelong obsession
with the ancient Maya.
Now that we have the introductions out of the way,
these brilliant poets will fill the room
with their exceptional poetry.
Please help me in welcoming our first reader, Edgar Garcia.
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