World Literature Today to Co-host Online “RESISTIR Latin America” Poetry Event
On Saturday, November 18 at 10am cst, the “RESISTIR Groupe” of Latin American PEN Centers, World Literature Today, and Latin American Literature Today will co-host an event, free and open to the public, showcasing thirty poets affiliated with eighteen Latin American PEN Centers from throughout the hemisphere. All are invited to attend by logging into Zoom at the following link (registration for the webinar will be available starting November 17).
The event is being organized, in a spirit of peace, by the Franco-Ecuadorian writer, novelist, poet, essayist, and painter Rocío Durán-Barba and will feature bilingual readings of poems from her two landmark anthologies, Resistir, antología de poesía latinoamericana 2020 and Resistir 2022–2023, 150 escritores más. Participating PEN Centers include Argentina, Bolivia, Chiapas, Chile, Colombia, Cuban Writers in Exile, Ecuador, Guadalajara, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Quechua, San Miguel de Allende, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
Durán-Barba contributed the “300 Latin American Poets of Resistance: Two Anthologies, One Unique Work” essay to WLT’s “Future of the Book” issue (May 2023), which also included poems by Missael Duarte Somoza (Nicaragua), Ernesto Diaz Rodriguez (Cuba), Lydia Corcione Crescini (Colombia), and Samuel Gonzalez-Seijas (Venezuela), translated by WLT editor in chief Daniel Simon.
In addition to Simon, eleven translators are contributing translations for the event, many of whom are longtime contributors to WLT and LALT: Wendy Call, Whitney DeVos, Arthur Malcolm Dixon, Joaquín Gavilano, George Henson, Robin Myers, Colleen Noland, Cal Paule, Lawrence Schimel, Anthony Seidman, and D. P. Snyder. Translators who are participating in the online event will each take turns reading poems by the featured poets, including those included in the May issue of WLT, all newly translated for this remarkable gathering of urgent voices from Central and South America as well as the Caribbean.
The author of over seventy books and recipient of numerous awards in France and internationally, Durán-Barba directs the Cultural Foundation RDB in Ecuador and the association Lettres en Vol in Paris. According to Claude Couffon, she wields “one of the most remarkable pens in the universe of Latin American literature.”
