Conversation & Reading

Many Poems: New Poetics of South America in Translation

Thu, Feb 27, 2025

6:00 PM–8:00 PM

Skylight Room (9100), CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, NYC. Free and open to all. Registration Required.

Bringing together poets and translators of poets from South America, this event will consist of readings followed by a conversation around emerging poets from the region, and their work in translation, with an emphasis on small-press ecosystems, both in South America and the U.S. Join poets and translators Alexis Almeida (translator of Roberta Iannamico), Judah Rubin (translator of Dalmacia Ruiz-Rosas Samohod), Eliana Hernandez-Pachón (poet; author of The Brush, Archipelago 2024), Natasha Tiniacos (poet, author of Against the Regime of the Fluent, Señal UDP 2024) for evening of readings and conversation, moderated by Coco Fitterman and Mónica de la Torre.

Free and open to all. The event will include books by the participants and a display of small press books and publications of South American poetry in translation.

About the Participants:

Alexis Almeida is the author of I Have Never Been Able to Sing (Ugly Duckling Presse 2018) and Things I Have Made a Fiction (Oversound 2024). Her translation of Roberta Iannamico’s Many Poems is just out from The Song Cave. She teaches at the Bard Microcollege at the Brooklyn Public Library and edits 18 Owls Press.

Eliana Hernández-Pachón is the author of The Brush, Archipelago Books, 2024, and researches contemporary Latin American literature and visual art, gender studies, and environmental humanities. She received a BA in Anthropology from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. The Brush received the Colombia National Poetry Prize in 2020.

Judah Rubin is the editor of A Perfect Vacuum. His translation of Rodrigo Quijano’s writing, An Inherent Tear was published by Wendy’s Subway in 2024. A translation of Dalmacia Ruíz-Rosas Samohod’s Peligro de los Labios Rojos is forthcoming with Ugly Duckling Presse’s Señal series in 2025.

Natasha Tiniacos is a poet, literary translator, and doctoral candidate in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and current Archival Research Fellow with Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. She specializes in twentieth and twenty-first-century Latin American and Latinx literature, disability, and sound studies. Her publications include Against the Regime of the Fluent/ Contra el régimen de lo fluido with translations by Beca Alderete Baca Ugly Duckling Presse), Mignumi o el cuerpo (d)el deseo (forthcoming, Los libros del fuego), and the Spanish translation of The Border Simulator/ El simulador de fronteras by Gabriel Dozal (One World).

Coco Sofia Fitterman (Moderator) is the author of the chapbook Say It With Flowers (Inpatient Press 2017). She is currently a Ph.D. student in the Comparative Literature department at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and an adjunct lecturer at Baruch College, as well as a Poetry Editor at Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ) and an Events Fellow at Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.

Mónica de la Torre (Moderator) Mónica de la Torre’s seven poetry books include Pause the Document (out from Nightboat this March), Repetition Nineteen, The Happy End / All Welcome, and two collections in Spanish published in her native Mexico City. Among other anthologies, she co-edited Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–79 and is the recipient of a 2022 Creative Capital grant and the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award for Poetry. She teaches poetry and experiments in translation at Brooklyn College.

This event is presented by Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative and the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center.