Poet Reina Maria Rodriguez & Kristin Dykstra in conversation with Urayoan Noel
Poet Reina María Rodríguez reads from her book of poetry The Winter Garden Photograph (Winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation) with translator Kristin Dykstra, followed by a conversation with Urayoán Noel.
This event will be held in Spanish and English. Co-presented with Ugly Duckling Presse.
A meditation on the power and limitations of images, The Winter Garden Photograph began as an homage to a magazine, The Courier, published by UNESCO. Reina María Rodríguez used the magazine’s photographs of faraway places to spark an investigation of the mental landscapes comprising her own, contemporary Havana. I think through / the breath in you; I think through / the blood in you: precisely in striving to inhabit other worlds, she pursues the self. With the original Cuban edition of this book, Rodríguez won her second Casa de las Américas Prize for Poetry.
The Winter Garden Photograph won the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, was long-listed for the Best Translated Book Award and the National Translation Award, and received an honorable mention from the 2019 Foreword Indies Award.
Reina María Rodríguez (b. 1952) lives in Havana, Cuba. Among other career awards, she has won the 2002 Alejo Carpentier Medal for Achievement in Cuban literature, Cuba’s 2013 National Prize for Literature, and the 2014 Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Prize for Poetry. It is difficult to name her most important books due to the sustained quality of her writing. With La foto del invernadero (The Winter Garden Photograph), now in a bilingual edition from Ugly Duckling Presse, she took her second Casa de las Américas prize in 1998. Recent books of poetry by Rodríguez include El piano (The Piano) and Luciérnagas (Fireflies). Among her many books exploring prose and prose poetry are Páramos (Plains, which won the 1993 Julián del Casal prize as well as a 1995 National Critics’ Award), Otras cartas a Milena (Other Letters to Milena, 2003; bilingual edition published by the University of Alabama Press), a novel entitled Tres maneras de tocar un elefante (Three Ways to Touch an Elephant, which won the Italo Calvino Prize), Variedades de Galiano (Galiano St. Variety), Otras mitologías (Other Mythologies), and La caja de Bagdad.
Kristin Dykstra is the principal translator of Reina María Rodríguez The Winter Garden Photograph (UDP, 2019), and, with Kent Johnson, she is co-editor of Amanda Berenguer’s Materia Prima (UDP, 2018). She is the translator of Cubanology, a book of days by Omar Pérez (Station Hill Press), and Other Letters to Milena, a mixed-genre book by Reina María Rodríguez published by University of Alabama Press, which has also published her translations of Cuban authors Juan Carlos Flores, Angel Escobar, and Marcelo Morales. She is guest editor of a dossier dedicated to Flores (1962 – 2016) in The Chicago Review. The recipient of an NEA Literary Translation Fellowship, Dykstra won the inaugural Gulf Coast Prize for Literary Translation.
Urayoán Noel is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico (University of Arizona Press) and the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press). A former fellow of the Ford Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and CantoMundo, he is also the translator of Wingston González's No Budu Please (Ugly Duckling Presse). Work from his ongoing Wokitokiteki project (wokitokiteki.com) has been published in Fence and Packingtown Review. Originally from Puerto Rico, Noel lives in the South Bronx and teaches at NYU, as well as at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas.
