PALABRA PURA: NOSSA AMÉRICA

PALABRA PURA: NOSSA AMÉRICA

NOVEMBER 18 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm | $5

La Bruquena Restaurant, 2726 W. Division in Humboldt Park

The last Palabra Pura for 2015 features the theme “Nossa América,” with readings by Rodrigo Garcia Lopes, Jack Martínez and AKaiser.  November’s curator Patricia Anzini quotes American poet Walt Whitman as she discusses this month’s Palabra Pura: “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature.”

Anzini mixes Whitman’s vision of the future inhabitants of this teeming continent with that of Palabra Pura. “Those predictions fell upon Palabra Pura when it first began its Chicagoland search for those teeming voices ten years ago. This November, we will continue and expand upon that exploration by expanding Palabra Pura’s latinidad to Brazil. We will hear the voices of Rodrigo Garcia Lopes (Brazil), Jack Martínez (Peru) and AKaiser (New York) as they address the Americas as a fundamentally ongoing intercontinental country. This work—their voices, our Chicago—will help us navigate and retrace the fluid borders between poetry and prose, Spanish, Portuguese, and English, and also, therefore, what it means to be American in ‘nossa América.’”

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Rodrigo Garcia Lopes is a poet, translator, and composer from Brazil. He has an M.A. from ASU (USA) and a Ph.D. in English from UFSC (Brazil). He has published six collections of poetry, translations of Whitman, Rimbaud, Plath, and Riding. Last year he released the historical detective novel The Troubadour. His poems have been widely published and anthologized, including in The Best 100 Brazilian Poems of the Twentieth Century. As a composer, he recently released the CD Songs from Reality Studio. Site: http://www.rgarcialopes.wix.com/site 

Jack Martínez (La Oroya, Perú, 1983) graduated in 2007 from the University of San Marcos (Lima, Perú) with a B.A. in Latin American Literature. In 2011, he moved to the United States where he wrote his first novel, Bajo la sombra (Under the Shade), published in Peru by Animal de Invierno in 2014. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University, and is currently working on his second novel, a love story which deals with the fictions of Latin American nationalisms in the U.S.  https://jackmartinezarias.wordpress.com/

AKaiser’s poems have recently appeared in Amsterdam Quarterly, Temenos Journal and Coldnoon: Travel Poetics. Her poem, “At the speed of light, squared,” was a finalist in the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2014 and can currently be read at www.wasafiri.org. This past spring, AKaiser completed her MFA at Carlow University (Pittsburgh/Dublin) and was invited to JIWAR, an artists’ and researchers’ residency in urban creativity in Spain. She has also been a resident at Brushcreek Foundation for the Arts in the US. AKaiser curates a bi-annual poetry reading series in collaboration with Station Independent Projects art gallery in NYC. She is also a translator of French, Spanish, and Catalan, currently working on the writings of Cebrià de Montoliu, the first translator of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass into Catalan.

Patrícia Anzini holds a BA in Studies of Languages and Literature and an MA in Literary Studies partially from her hometown Universidade Estadual Paulista – UNESP (Brazil) and from the University of Winnipeg (Canada), where she wrote her thesis on poets associated with Brazilian Marginal Poetry (1970s) in dialogue with Tropicalism (1960s). She is a PhD student in the Comparative Literary Studies Program at Northwestern University. She also has experience with teaching in the field of languages and is currently involved with the practice of poetry translation.