POETRY READING / LECTURA DE POESÍA:
Anna Deeny Morales & Roberto Tejada
Thursday, April 8, 6:30pm (Pacific)
presented by / presentado por:
EL GRUPO & The University of California at Berkley English Department’s Holloway Reading Series
Co-sponsored by the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, and the Department of Comparative Literature
(More information on Anna Deeny Morales, Roberto Tejada, and UC Berkeley’s “EL GRUPO“ below)
Register here for the zoom link / Regístrese aquí para el enlace de zoom
Anna Deeny Morales is a librettist, translator of poetry, and literary critic. Recent works in opera include ¡ZAVALA-ZAVALA! an opera in v cuts, commissioned by the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, which will debut in 2022; and La Paloma at the Wall, which debuted in 2019 at Gala Hispanic Theater, Washington, DC. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for her translation of the volume Tala (1938) by Chile’s Nobel-Prize winning poet Gabriela Mistral, Deeny Morales has also translated, edited, and written about the work of the contemporary Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, and the Argentine poets Alejandra Pizarnik and Mercedes Roffé, among others. Forthcoming works include her edited, translated selection (to be pulished by New Directions) of the poetry of Chile’s famed “anti-poet” Nicanor Parra. A volume of Deeny Morales’ criticism, Other Solitudes: Essays on Consciousness and Poetry, is forthcoming in 2022. Deeny Morales received her Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley, and teaches in the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. She serves on the Board of Directors of the In Series, and chairs the Gabriela Mistral Youth Poetry Competition. Anna Deeny Morales’s reading will be introduced by Francine Masiello, UC Berkeley Professor Emerita of Spanish & Portuguese, and of Comparative Literature. [Anna Deeny Morales]
Roberto Tejada is author of the poetry collections Full Foreground (University of Arizona Press, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan University Press, 2010), Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006), a selected poems in Spanish translation, Todo en el ahora (Libros Magenta, 2015), and a Latinx poetics of the Américas, Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (Noemi, 2019). Tejada founded and co-edited the enormously influential journal Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas / Mandorla: Nueva Escritura de las Américas, a multilingual annual of poetry and translation (1991-2014). He is the author of art histories that include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (Minnesota, 2009) and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (Minnesota, 2009), and of catalog essays in Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 (Hammer Museum, 2011) and Allora & Calzadilla: Specters of Noon (The Menil Collection; Yale University Press, 2021) He is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston where he teaches Creative Writing and Art History. Roberto Tejada’s reading will be introduced by Matthew Gonzales, Ph.D. candidate in UC Berkeley’s Department of Comparative Literature, and in UCB’s intedisciplinary graduate Program in Critical Theory. [Roberto Tejada]