Creative Writing
You grew up hearing two languages – one you can pull apart, name, slap a series of rules to, twist like clay dough in a child’s hand – the other you cannot explain, you listen and you know. It is a language you understand intuitively – like being able to read the sunrise, the strips of pink and orange, the clumps of uneven clouds, a thin patch of grey and the moon, and somehow, without thinking twice, you know what kind of day it will be. You understand like this because you are the first born. First generation. First American. First cousin. First hope.
-- M. Evelina Galang, “Lectures You Never Learned Back Home”
In a global society where languages float across borders, race and class, we have become a nation of polyglot people. At the University of Miami our student body represents 146 nations and it is common to walk across the campus and hear conversations in more than two or three languages. Not unusual when you consider that the US Census Bureau has determined that the number of people speaking a language other than English at home has doubled in the last three decades. Polyglot Writers: A Reading Series on Writing Across Languages explores the fluidity of words as they define and redesign the narratives of writers who come from multiple languages, cultures and traditions.
This year, in addition to our formal readings, we have partnered with our friends at Books & Books and are hosting salons featuring polyglot writers and scholars from the University of Miami. Join us as we engage in a series of fine desserts, after dinner drinks, and conversations that focus on the play of language in all its forms.
The MFA in Creative Writing is pleased to offer the following series in collaboration with Department of English, College of Arts and Sciences, American Studies Program, Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures’ Joseph Carter Memorial Fund, and Multicultural Student Affairs, and our partners at Books & Books.
Cristina Garcia (www.cristinagarcianovelist.com) is the author of five novels: Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, and The Lady Matador’s Hotel, recently published by Scribner. García has edited two anthologies, Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature and Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. Two works for young readers, The Dog Who Loved the Moon, and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox were published in 2008. A collection of poetry, The Lesser Tragedy of Death, was published in 2010. Her newest work, Dreams of Significant Girls, is a young adult novel set in a Swiss boarding school in the 1970s.
García’s work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fourteen languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant, among others. Recently, Garcia was a Visiting Professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin and teaches at Texas Tech University most spring semesters. This fall, Garcia will be a Visiting Professor at the University of Miami and will serve as University Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University-San Marcos from 2012-14.
John Murillo (www.johnmurillo.com) is the author of the poetry collection, Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher 2010). A graduate of New York University's MFA program in creative writing, he has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the New York Times, the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in such publications as Callaloo, Court Green, Ninth Letter, and Ploughshares, and is forthcoming in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African-American Poetry. His choreo-play, Trigger, has been commissioned by Edgeworks Dance Theater and is scheduled for production in spring 2011. A founding member of the poetry collective, The Symphony, he has taught at New York University, Columbia College Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Currently, he is visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Cornell University.
Tuesday, September 6
Listen Now
Reading
7-8PM
CAS Gallery
1210 Stanford Drive
Coral Gables, FL 33146
Wednesday, September 7
Writers' Salon
8:30PM
Books & Books
927 Lincoln Road Miami Beach
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Nathalie Handal is an award-winning poet and playwright. She has lived in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Arab world. She has read her poetry worldwide, has been featured on PBS The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, NPR Radio as well as The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters, Mail & Guardian, The Jordan Times and Il Piccolo; and her work has been translated into more than fifteen languages. She is the author of numerous books including, Love and Strange Horses, winner of the 2011 Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award, and an Honorable Mention at the San Francisco Book Festival and the New England Book Festival. The New York Times says it is "a book that trembles with belonging (and longing)." She is the co-editor of the landmark anthology, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, called a "beautiful achievement for world literature" by Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer. Handal is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, a Fundación Araguaney Fellow, recipient of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature 2011, and an Honored Finalist for the Gift of Freedom Award. She was listed as one of the "100 Most Powerful Arab Women 2011" in a Special Report by ArabianBusiness.com. Her new collection, Poet in Andalucía, is forthcoming Spring 2012. She writes the blog-column, The City and The Writer for Words without Borders magazine.
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. His work has appeared in several journals in the USA and abroad. Peepal Tree Press (UK) published his first book, Far District, spring 2010. He is a Pirogue Fellow and has been nominated for the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil award for poetry.
Tuesday, November 29
Listen Now
Reading
7-8PM
CAS Gallery
1210 Stanford Drive
Coral Gables, FL 33146
Wednesday, November 30
Writers' Salon
8:30PM
Books & Books
265 Aragon Avenue
Coral Gables, Fl 33134
$10 at the door, free admission for students with University of Miami ID
SCS grew up bilingually and biculturally, in Los Angeles and Santa Cruz, California, with extended stays in Madrid, Spain and Guadalajara, México. In the early 80’s, during the height of apartheid, she lived for several years in Pretoria, South Africa. She teaches courses on U.S. Latin@ and Latin American literature and culture at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Co-editor, with Frances R. Aparicio, of Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad (UPNE/Dartmouth 1997) and, with Librada Hernández, of Reading and Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American and Spanish Culture (Wisconsin 2000), she has also published numerous essays on Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, as well as on other contemporary Argentine and Chicana authors.
Her book, Killer Crónicas: Bilingual Memories, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in November 2004. The book’s genesis was in bilingual, code-switching e-mails she wrote while living in Buenos Aires (on an NEH fellowship) during 2000-01. She called these collective e-mail missives “crónicas” [chronicles], inspired by the rough-hewn, journalistic, often fantastic first-hand accounts of the so-called New World sent “home” by the early conquistadores.
Her crónicas are anchored in an unequivocal at-homeness in both Spanish and English and the space(s) in-between; her work is at home in U.S. Chican@/Latin@ literature, but navigates other transcultural terrains as well, such as Spain, Mexico, Argentina and South Africa, all geographies which are at once “heimlich” and ineluctably foreign to her. She has travelled throughout the U.S., to Spain, Argentina, South Africa, and Australia giving performed readings from her work. Her second book of crónicas, Scenes from la Cuenca de Los Angeles y otros Natural Disasters was published in April 2010 by the University of Wisconsin Press. Her creative work has been widely reprinted online and in print journals and anthologies, most recently in the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2010) and in Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing (2012).
Bino A. Realuyo was born and raised in Manila, the son of a survivor of the Bataan Death March and a World War II Japanese concentration camp in the Philippines. He is a poet and a novelist, an adult educator and a community activist. He is the author of the award winning books, The Umbrella Country, a novel and The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, a poetry collection. He was also the editor of The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings About New York City and The Literary Review's Spring 2000 special issue on the Philippines: Am Here: Contemporary Filipino Writings in English. His works have appeared in The Nation, The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, New Letters, and several anthologies. He was a co-founder of the Asian American Writers Workshop. He works in the field of adult literacy, especializing in the integration of computer technology, Workforce Education, and Adult Literacy in disenfranchised immigrant communities.
Realuyo has a degree in International Relations from the School of International Service at The American University in Washington, DC and Universidad Argentina de La Empresa in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has a Masters of Education degree, with a focus on Technology, Innovation, and Education from Harvard University, where he was also honored with a Catherine D. Reynolds Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship from The Kennedy School's Center for Public Leadership.
Tuesday, April 10
Reading
8:30PM
Books & Books
265 Aragon Avenue
Coral Gables, Fl 33134
Wednesday, April 11
Listen Now
Writers' Salon
8:30PM
CAS Gallery
1210 Stanford Drive
Coral Gables, FL 33146
