Indie Press Month: Eliana Hernández-Pachón Discusses The Brush with Natasha Tiniacos Live in Translation
This event has been cancelled.
In collaboration with the Indie Publishers Caucus and EveryLibrary, BPL is celebrating Indie Press Month with a special series spotlighting our vibrant local indie publishing culture and exploring the perspectives of authors, editors, and publishers.
Bushwick Library is pleased to welcome Eliana Hernández-Pachón and Natasha Tiniacos to discuss Hernández-Pachón's poem The Brush, the translation process, and working with her publisher Archipelago Books. The conversation will be in Spanish with live English interpretation. Everyone is welcome!
Pablo Rodriguez steps thirteen paces out into the night and buries a wooden box. Its contents: a chain, a medallion, a few photographs, and finally, the deeds for the house. Meanwhile, his wife Ester - a sharpshooter and keeper of all village secrets - slips into her fifth dream of the night. As Ester tosses and Pablo pats his fresh mound of earth, another character emerges in Eliana Hernández-Pachón's prophetic narrative poem. The Brush is a tangled grove, a thicket of vines, an orchid pummeled with rain. Told from the voices of Pablo, Ester, and the Brush itself, Hernández-Pachón's tryptich is a response to a traumatic event in recent Colombian history: the massacre in the village of El Salado between February 16 and 21, 2000. Paramilitary forces tortured and killed sixty people. The Brush is a fearless, incantatory exploration of collective trauma. It is also an extraordinary depiction of ecological resistance, of the natural world that both endures human cruelty and lives on in spite of it.
Please RSVP in advance as space is limited. Food and refreshments will be provided. After the discussion, there will be opportunity for Q&A with the audience.
PARTICIPANTS
Eliana Hernández-Pachón researches contemporary Latin American literature and visual art, gender studies, and environmental humanities. She received a BA in Anthropology from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. The Brush received the Colombia National Poetry Prize in 2020.
Natasha Tiniacos is a poet, literary translator, and scholar. She is the author of Against the Regime of the Fluent / Contra el régimen de lo fluido, translated by Rebeca Alderete Baca (Ugly Duckling Presse), Historia privada de un etcétera (Libros del Fuego), and Mujer a fuego lento (Equinoccio). She is also the Spanish translator of Gabriel Dozal’s The Border Simulator / El simulador de fronteras (One World). Her poetry and translations have appeared in The Baffler and Fence. She has received fellowships from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and has been a poet-in-residence at Campo Air (Uruguay), the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA from New York University and is a Ph.D. candidate at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
