Poetry Reading and Conversation with Cristina Pérez Díaz and Isabel Sobral Campos

Cristina Pérez Díaz is a Puerto Rican writer and translator. Her translation of José Watanabe’s ‘Antígona’ won the 2023 ASTR Translation Prize. Her poems and translations have appeared in 𝘈𝘴𝘺𝘮𝘱𝘵𝘰𝘵𝘦, 𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘴 𝘞𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘉𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴, and 𝘌𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘢 𝘊𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘢. She has published two chapbooks of poetry in Spanish: Adentro crían pájaros (Parawa) and Nueva anatomía imaginaria (La impresora). Haunted by the violent legacies of colonialism on both landscape and bodies, her first book deliriously dreams with the foundation of a country from the bed of two lovers. 𝘍𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘍𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘊𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘺 has garnered praise from Mara Pastor, Chloe García Roberts, Phoebe Giannisi, Margarita Pintado Burgos, and Isabel Sobral Campos, who writes “Pérez Díaz’s dazzling poem stretches the borders between languages and histories, unearthing a chasm that challenges the colonial forces behind its eruption.”

Isabel Sobral Campos is the author of The Optogram of the Mind is a Carnation, selected for the Futurepoem 2023 Other Futures Award, as well as two other full-length poetry books, How to Make Words of Rubble (Blue Figure Press, 2020), and Your Person Doesn’t Belong to You (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2018). She has published several chapbooks, and her poetry has appeared in the Boston Review, Black Sun Lit, and the Brooklyn Rail. Her poems have also been included in the anthologies BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press) and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World (Spuyten Duyvil). In 2024, her collaborative translation of Salette Tavares’s LEX ICON was published by Ugly Duckling Presse. She co-founded and edits Sputnik & Fizzle press with her sister and lives in Cambridge, MA.

Haunted by the violent legacies of colonialism on both landscape and bodies, Cristina Pérez Díaz’s first book of poems From the Founding of the Country deliriously dreams with the foundation of a country from the bed of two lovers. Taking root in the discordant influences of Walt Whitman and Puerto Rican poet Manuel Ramos Otero, and in the exposed cracks of the nation-building project, The Founding of the Country is simultaneously utopian dream and post-colonial critique. The long poem tells a fragmentary narrative of two lovers—one languid and liquid, the other sharp as exclamation points—who are also two nations bound in a horrendous love. Whitman’s athletics finds itself dismembered in the impossibility of the colonial situation. The non-optimistic voice takes over to renounce the hopes of tamable landscapes and sings the erasure of the tropes of foundational histories.

Isabel Sobral Campos‘s The Optogram of the Mind Is a Carnation is a book-length poem-memoir reflecting on Portuguese colonization of African countries and its place within the imperial and colonial forces that have shaped global history for the past 500 years. Drawing on the writings of Amílcar Cabral and others, as well as interviews with family members about life under Salazar’s dictatorship, it weaves together scholarly sources, familial narratives, and memories, exploring nationalistic myths, Portugal’s violent colonial history, and the author’s experiences growing up in the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution.