Essential Cuban Poetry: A Reading and Discussion

Cuban-born Pablo Medina is the author of sixteen books, among them the poetry collections The Island Kingdom, The Man Who Wrote on Water, Calle Habana, and Points of Balance/Puntos de Apoyo, and others; the novels Cubop City Blues, The Cigar Roller, The Return of Felix Nogara, and Marks of Birth; the memoir Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood. In 2015 he published a collection of translations from the Spanish of Virgilio Piñera titled The Weight of the Island. Acclaimed as “lyrical and powerfully evocative” and “deserving a prominent spot in today’s literature of exile,” Medina’s work has appeared in various languages and in magazines and periodicals throughout the world.  Winner of many awards for his work, including grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, The Cintas Foundation, the State Arts Councils of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and others. Currently, Medina is professor of fiction, poetry, and translation at Emerson College in Boston.

James O’Connor is a poet, playwright, and translator from New York City. He has lived in France, Mexico, and from 1999 to 2000 he lived in Havana, Cuba. In 2006 he was awarded a playwriting fellowship from the Edward F. Albee Foundation. In the first comprehensive selection and translation of Dulce María Loynaz's poetry, O'Connor invites us to hear the haunting voice of Cuba's celebrated poet. Widely published in Spain during the 1950s, Loynaz's poetry was almost forgotten in Cuba after the Revolution. International recognition came to her late: at the age of ninety she was living in seclusion in Havana when the Royal Spanish Academy awarded her the 1992 Cervantes Prize, the highest literary accolade in the Spanish language. The first English publication of her work, Absolute Solitude contains a selection of poems from each of Loynaz's books, including the acclaimed prose poems from Poems with No Names, a selection of posthumously published work.

Margaret Randall is a poet, essayist, oral historian, translator, photographer and social activist. She lived in Latin America for 23 years (in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua). From 1962 to 1969 she and Mexican poet Sergio Mondragón co-edited El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn, a bilingual literary quarterly that published some of the best new work of the sixties. When she came home in 1984, the government ordered her deported because it found some of her writing to be “against the good order and happiness of the United States.” With the support of many writers and others, she won her case in 1989. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, she taught at several universities, most often Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Randall’s most recent poetry titles include My Town, As If The Empty Chair / Como Si La Silla Vacia, The Rhizome As A Field Of Broken Bones and Daughter Of Lady Jaguar Shark (Wings Press, San Antonio); her prose titles include Che On My Mind (Duke University Press), and More Than Things (University of Nebraska Press). Her latest collection of poems, About Little Charlie Lindbergh, appeared from Wings in Summer 2014.  Haydee Santamaria, Cuban Revolutionary: She Led By Transgression, is also recently out from Duke. Her most recent collection of poems is She Becomes Time. She is the editor and translator of the fully bilingual anthology of Cuban poetry, Only The Road / Solo El Camino.

Poeta, profesor y ensayista cubano residente en México. Graduado del Instituto Superior Pedagógico Enrique José Varona en la especialidad de Español y literatura y con un doctorado en Letras por la Universidad de México. Ha publicado, entre otros, Joyas de papel (1983) La ciudad de los castillos (1985) Alfonso Reyes: cartas a La Habana (1989) y Balance de cuentos (1993) y La Dama de América. Textos y documentos sobre Dulce María Loynaz (2016).